Living in wallpaper stripping hell.

As was typical for homes in the 80's, almost every room in the house was wallpapered. I've never been a fan, and almost fly into a flat-out rage over people who paint over wallpaper. After a month or two of getting settled in, I began stripping wallpaper.

The first room I did was the master bedroom. It wasn't fully wallpapered, but had border that had been painted over. PAINTED OVER!!!! It took something like a month of standing on a chair with my arms over my head spraying DIF and scraping the bits off with a putty knife. Yeah, it sucked. I don't have any "after" pictures because I am still waiting to replace the carpet, which is gold. If you squint your eyes real hard, it kinda looks like hardwood flooring. Okay, not really.

I then moved onto the guest room. At least the wallpaper wasn't painted over. My mom read or heard somewhere that a clothes steamer does well at removing wallpaper, and that's what I used in here. It works well if the wallpaper isn't painted over. When we bought the house I checked out some books at the library about French Country decor. I don't remember where I got the idea for that. I think it was because I like toile. As it turns out, there's no toile in the room. Here's before and after...

The bed is antique and I got it from my sister-in-law, Alicia. She and her husband bought a piece of property that had an old decrepit house on it. A previous owner had plans for a bed and breakfast that never materialized, and the house was full of antique furniture and housewares, but needed to be torn down. So, everyone got to take what they wanted out of the house before it was torn down. This bed was painted white and the rosettes were maroon. As if I hadn't had enough stripping wallpaper, I stripped and sanded the bed and repainted it black. It turned out great.