The day started with the grand plan of finishing off the master bedroom and hopefully caulking and/or priming the master bath.
We got rolling:
Olympic's Cozy Corner - Less purply in real life. We loooove this color.
We paused before doing the fourth wall (the bed wall), because we were going to do an accent wall in Admiralty, a navy blue, but as will be discussed in a later post, we eventually decided against it. But we needed to let the swatch (around Mike's head in the photo) dry before priming over to continue on with the wall.
So, we decided to get going on the shower room, which had been stripped of its wallpaper all the way down to the wallboard.
Or so we thought.
Mike had the misfortune of delivering the bad news. There was still a layer or two (or three) of wallpaper glue. We'd let the room be for several days, and in that time, it seems the walls decided to show their true colors, or rather their scales. I probably resembled a cartoon character with steam coming out of my ears. Lucky for me, Mike took on the challenge, since he is basically a wallpaper whisperer.
With just a sponge loaded with warm soap and water, Mike gave the walls a good bath and scraped with a plastic putty knife. He could get big, long peels when he hit good spots.
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| Have to say, ladies. Nothin' hotter than a man conquering wallpaper glue with a smile! And, yes, that peeling stuff is all glue. |
The wall is basically a schizophrenic nightmare (apologies to anyone actually suffering from the condition). Along with the basic wallboard, there are areas with paint, along with glue and wood stain (whenever there is woodwork nearby). But it's like there are 2-3 different types and/or layers of glue, like it was applied differently at different times ... but there was only one layer of wallpaper. Plus, you have the random swaths of paint. Perhaps the original builders/owners couldn't decide between beige and wallpaper? Whatever.
On the bright side, while sopping the walls, we've managed to clean some of the dirty grout on the floor tiles. We're leaving the fan running all night as a moisture precaution, since we are concerned about soaking nearly bare walls and it dripping down in the cracks between the trim and the wall. Mold, anyone? I do have a mold treatment/prevention spray that I've done around the cracked shower grout, but that won't get behind the trim. I think we are going to make sure everything is dry before we start slapping caulk and primer around.
Speaking of caulk ...
Along with wallpaper glue bringing things to a screeching halt, I had a bit of a "d'oh!" While Mike was battling glue demons, I decided to try out a little DIY trim trick on the no-longer-accent wall. Our trim is not in fantastic shape. There are gaps between the trim and the wall that paint can't fix. A favorite DIY trick is to lay painters tape in two very close rows to make a clean line to smooth caulk in the joints between the wall and trim. If you're painting trim white, this also creates a crisp, clean line to make that whole cutting in thing a lot easier.
I'd already purchased some tub and tile caulk and figured it'd work just as well on the trim. It went pretty slick. As per other DIYers, I taped off, squirted it on, and then smoothed the caulk out with a wet finger and pulled off the tape while it was still wet. It looked fantastic and was a salve to the wallpaper burn.
As we packed up for the night, I suddenly realized all my gaps were showing again. o_0
Cue Luke Skywalker screaming NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
I ran my finger over my disappearing work. The caulk was there, smooth and beautiful, soaring over the offending gaps. Then it hit me.
I'd used paintable but clear drying caulk.
Bugger.
It's not the end of the world. We're painting the trim anyway and can now paint over the gaps, but we'll need to tape again to keep that clean line. Sad but true. So, we bought some white caulk on the way back to the crash pad to use on the rest of the trim, and we can still use the clear caulk for filling in cracks in other places before painting. Not all is lost, and now we know it really does dry clear.
So, today was definitely a setback, but we learned stuff. I guess that's how it goes. Grumble.
I caulk, then paint the trim, overlapping the caulk, then paint the wall. FYI, paintable caulk needs to be painted. You can't leave it exposed because it's sticky. I'm interested you got that trick with the painters tape to work. I tried it once and it left a definite ridge where the tape had been. Luckily the caulk wasn't dry so I could get it off and start over.
ReplyDeleteYou linked to YHL as an example of how to caulk. I wouldn't take their advice on how to do any DIY, they areterribly unskilled
We swear by the painters tape! We didn't get a ridge in the bedroom, or barely anything, because we only covered a sliver of the wall, just to have the goal of filling the gaps between the trim and wall. In the bathroom, we purposely covered more wall to experiment and because some of the gaps were more noticeable and we were moisture paranoid. I also went a bit thicker with the caulk. When I pulled the tape off, there was definitely a ridge line, but only noticeable if you're laying on the floor at eye-level with it.
ReplyDeleteYHL is a mixed bag. I feel like their earlier stuff was better and more thought out. I only found them a few months ago and have spent most of my time in the archives, where we enjoyed the "two bumbling, happy fools figuring things out and making it work" vibe. So many of the DIY blogs out there feel inaccessible to me - plus we were thinking of buying a major fixer upper brick ranch around the time we were going through the archives, so there was some definite transference going on there. Mike and I were discussing them today (ha, in Lowes), and he thinks that their stumble was when it became about the blog and not about making their home a home.
Credit where it's due: I wouldn't have though of the caulk/tape trick if I hadn't read YHL (we did pop to other places that also did it, but that's where we first heard about. Nothing's original on the 'net these days).