The First Shots Have Been Fired

Dj reporting here from the kitchen—remodeling ground zero.

Well, its only been five years and we have finally decided that we need to make this place our own. You see, this house used to belong to my folks, Grinder and I bought it from my dad about a year ago. My mom passed away a couple years ago, and since then I really couldn’t bring myself to make too many changes to the house…but now its TIME!! The kitchen is not really too bad, but it needs to be updated. It had sort of a “pinkish” wallpaper and border that just had to go, and butcher block type counters, which were great in the 70’s—not so much now. Oh yeah and the floor is white outlined with pinkish beige squares. We decided that we would like to replace that with hardwood floors.

So I decided to start with the kitchen wallpaper. There was a border that went all around the top of the kitchen walls. The border actually came off pretty easily. I took out my trusty squirt bottle and got the border wet. The top layer just peeled right off, leaving a real thin brown paper. I saturated the brown paper with more warm water and was able to easily peel the rest off. The only disappointing thing was that the paper left a sort of light brownish yellowish color. I was hoping that all I would have to do is wash it off and not repaint that part of the wall. But I might have to—we’ll see.

There is only one wall in the kitchen that had this pink wallpaper on it—thank goodness. The part with the wallpaper is inset (hard to explain) and then it continues on behind the sink and counter. I used my squirt bottle of warm water on the paper. Again, the top pink part of the wallpaper came off pretty easily, but instead of just leaving ONE layer of brown paper, there were THREE layers of brown paper.

I think whenever my mom changed the wallpaper, she must have always just taken off the top layer and left the backing on it. Anyway, after I got the pink part off, I tugged on the brown paper a little and it was so old, it tore off — and behind it was this bright yellow paint with dried glue on it. Yuk. So…I tried it behind the sink, and it was coming off, but then the drywall paper also started to come off in parts.

In the sections where the drywall came off, I remembered there used to be a lovely (not!) brown mosaic tile. I guess that when the tile was removed it must have just been wallpapered over or something—I have no idea. I will definitely have to fix that damaged part—yikes! It took me about 4 hours to remove the larger section of wallpaper completely—and it was a struggle, but I think I got it all. One thing I noticed is that the wallpaper goes behind the baseboard so, I’ll have to take the base board off and I’m not sure how to do that without breaking it. Also, since we are getting new countertops, I’m wondering if I should wait until those are installed before finishing/repairing/painting, because I don’t know how high the new back splash will be—there might be more wallpaper or damage behind what is there now.

Hmmmm……so I’m sort of at a standstill right now with a bright yellow wall with brown stains on it. LOVELY!! LOL As God as my witness I will NEVER put wallpaper on a wall. It’s a pain to take it off!!!! But I know this is gonna look really good when we are done!!!!!!!. (I hope!)

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Quick note from Grinder. Already things are changing.

We had decided on Vendura countertops - the prelim estimate was about $2000 and we liked the look. All was good but there was always something in the back of DJ's mind saying we should keep our eyes open.

Last weekend we went to Drexels and fell in love with a new MORE expensive countertop. Sure instead of $66 a sq foot it was more like $100, but it was too late. We would never be happy with the "old" plain Vendura counters. No estimate yet but now we won't be happy with the Vendura. they just did not have the color we wanted. We would forever say - "what if".

Curses!!