A Tiny Experiment in Wallpaper Removal

This is part of our Tiny House, Tiny Bloggers series, in which we turn over Plaster & Disaster to some VERY tiny bloggers to tell their own story of transforming an ugly, old (doll)house into a fresh and modern (doll)home.  Follow it from the beginning here.

Disclaimer:  Inclusion on this blog is not an endorsement by Plaster & Disaster of the tiny blogger’s methods or design decisions.  Plaster & Disaster cannot be held responsible for your terrible decor choices after reading one of their tutorials.  All opinions are their own.

Tiny bloggers here!  We have to admit, we were feeling like total pros given how easy it was for us to knock down a wall, compared to the endless blabbering that Sage is doing over every inch of her kitchen progress.  So you have a floor, big deal!  (I mean, thank you Naomi and Sage for letting us share our story on your blog….)  However, this latest project definitely cut us down to size.  It was SO MUCH WORK.  It took like two hours!

What could possibly be this intensive?  You guessed it: we removed wallpaper.

Let’s pause to reflect for a moment that we actually bought a (tiny)house with real wallpaper out of all the options we considered in our weeks-long marathon (doll)house hunt.  Most of the houses at our scale don’t have this feature, so we thought it was pretty cool to find a house this authentic!  I mean, we can’t be REAL bloggers without a post complaining about how terrible it is to remove wallpaper in our fixer upper home… and we are TOTALLY real bloggers, guys.

However, let’s just say we learned a tiny bit about why all the bloggers complain about this task.  It was quite the job!

For the benefit of all of our devoted readers, we did a little experiment about how to best remove wallpaper and tried out several methods so that we could share with you which ones work best.  This will probably be helpful for you when you inevitably to go remove the ugly wallpaper from your dollhouse someday.

First, we tried leaving it in Sage’s spare room and hoping that it would go away or get eaten by a cat.

That wasn’t super effective, FYI.  We also tried showing the wallpaper the mood boards that we’re working on to guide our house-wide design, hoping that it would realize that it just doesn’t fit in. However, if it did come to that realization, it certainly didn’t take that as its cue to leave. It was still looking just as wallpaper-y as ever. Rude.

Unfortunately for us, the method that worked best was actually going and removing the wallpaper manually with, like, tools and our hands.

There were actually two different kinds of wallpaper in our house and we approached them a little differently.  For the traditional, paper wallpaper, we spritzed it drenched it with water and then scrapped it off with a wide razor scraper.

Some rooms had paper that came down comparatively easily, while others were a real pain. And by “real pain,” we mean totally disgusting mess of wet paper and sticky residue.

It was doubley worse because some rooms had multiple layers. Like this room, which first had a layer of wild green wallpaper:

And underneath that a layer of old and very brittle wallpaper covered in water stains (which definitely weren’t from all our spritzing…we swear…).

The other kind of wallpaper in the house was more like contact paper. In fact, it was contact paper. Getting that off worked best by just pulling on it with our hands and occasionally tweezers for the really stubborn parts.

It was definitely a lot of work, but the worst part was probably the smell. All those layers of wallpaper had trapped a whole lot of must, and as we started to peel it away the smell was horrible. Fortunately we haven’t actually moved in yet, so we didn’t have to worry about living there through this or the health impacts on Madison and Aiden.

Of course as you may have noticed, we did enlist some help. We’re totally real DIY bloggers, but after about 15 minutes of going it alone we realized that we would save a lot of time and energy if we paid someone taller to help us with this project.

And by “paid,” we mean “for some reason these grown women chose to do this in their free time.”

When all was said and done, we were left with a huge pile of debris.

Fortunately we had heard of a great service called “Trash Bag” where you get a big white trash bag delivered to your house, fill it up, and then someone magically disposes of it for you. (All opinions are our own, receiving this service for free in no way influenced us to feel favorably about it.)

And now we are left with the beautiful “after”!

Okay so maybe it’s not beautiful. But after literally two full hours of hard work/supervising Naomi and Sage, we’re so relieved to have this blank slate that now we get to paint! Of course we’ve already changed our minds a million times about paint colors. We’ll probably end up going light and neutral and then adding pops of color through accessories, but who knows — we might get carried away with an accent wall or two.

After such a long project, we feel like we should do a whole post on our emotional journey through this undertaking. We know there are so many people out there going through hard times, and after this project we can really relate. Maybe our persistence would be inspiring to others who are facing big challenges? If you guys would be interested, we could talk to Naomi and Sage about a follow up!  (Editors note: PASS)