26 November 2007

Finished

Bee stripe socks:



Bee stripe yarn from Lorna's Laces. I made up the pattern as I went along. These are a Christmas gift.

A more impressive finished object:



Our bedroom.

This is just a little slice of wall between a bookcase and the door. Note that it is painted. Jut plain ol' paint on drywall. NO WALLPAPER.

When we moved into the house 2 years ago, the bedroom was painted a weird tan-brown on top of textured wallpaper, with burgundy border. I set to work right away removing the wallpaper. Our bedroom is stupidly large, so this involved peeling many square yards of wallpaper off the walls. But I finally did it! And then started to scrub the painted walls...and realized that there was another layer of wallpaper under that paint.

Yes, I could see faint images of flowers under the white of the wall. More distressingly, as I scrubbed the wallpaper paste off of the paint, flecks of the paint came off here and there, letting me know that if we tried painting on top of the painted-plus-wallpapered wall we could expect disaster.

So, we started scraping off the next layer of wallpaper. This involved peeling off the upper layer of paint-plus-wallpaper first, then peeling off the paper-plus-adhesive (it had to be a two step procedure, since we quickly discovered that if we tried to take it all off in one piece, the drywall was going to come off with the paper).

Did I mention how much wall surface area we have in our room? Acres. It seemed to take F.O.R.E.V.E.R. I tried to take some of the tedium away by only working on it during Star Trek Voyager reruns (which I now associate with crappy wallpaper, by the way).

But the wallpaper is all gone. The drywall is patched. The walls are painted. The switch plates are back on the light switches after 2 years of no-switch-plates. I wake up in the morning, open my eyes, and see a painted wall in a pleasant periwinkle color.

And if you ever even think about being lazy and not taking down old wallpaper before you paint or paper, you are a very bad person and probably have cooties. Please get away from me.

Also finished this weekend but not pictured: a long sleeve t-shirt for Kid1 in a periwinkle knit that goes nicely with the walls (I'm a big fan of periwinkle); and, this year's version of fleece Hello Kitty jammies for Kid2.

5 comments:

Pensguys said...

Love the Bee socks AND the paint. Pretty!

I've wanting to make Bee socks for while now.

km said...

Yeah finished socks. YEAH finished paint! I know how that feels. We peeled wall paper in our master bedroom, the hall, and both bathrooms. And the previous owner wallpapered before the baseboards were glued up. Yes...I said glued. With some sort of liquid nails. I'd like to see the HK jammies. My little one is a big fan.

Tara said...

Sounds like an episode of This Old House... Well Norm, there were so many layers of paint over wallpaper we had to call in our resident expert who decided to just strip it down to the studs...
Both projects – the socks and the walls – look mighty impressive to me!

chipper said...

congrats on all jobs well done!!!

kitten said...

LOVE the socks! Beautiful wall! we had to take our wall paper down before painting also. I found using warm water and downy help a lot! I'll be gald when we get ours done, but since I got sick before school started we didn't get it done then. Hopefully through the Christmas Holidays we will.
Take care!