If you peruse through the last few years of any design or DIY blog, Instagram, or Pinterest account, there is no doubt that wallpaper has made a comeback-- and for good reason! Your grandma's gaudy florals have stepped aside for more modern, contemporary patterns that seem truly endless.
Before I moved into my house in July, I incessantly brainstormed ways I could incorporate Instagram-worthy wallpaper patterns in different rooms. I dreamt about a completely pattern-clad papered bathroom that would somehow withstand the steam of the shower, and an accent wall in every guest room.
My fantasy didn't last long.
Only two days after Nate and I got possession of the house, we started prepping for our DIY overhaul. We had grandiose plans to paint every single room (save one or two) in two weeks before our boxed belongings consumed the space. We started in the kitchen with washing walls and scraping little bumps off to prepare for painting, which is where things spiraled out of control. The kitchen was one of the rooms that we definitely wanted to paint since it was slathered in an ugly beige. Otherwise, there wasn't much to be done in that room compared to some of the other homes we looked at that needed complete kitchen renovations. As I began scraping the walls in the kitchen, I gouged a huge hole in the paint- I only wish that was where my nightmare ended. For a split second, I thought "Oh well, I'll just spackle it and it will be fine."
Nope.
I pulled an edge of the paint that was separated from the wall in an attempt to smooth the spot that I had mangled, and it just kept peeling and ripping off. It kind of felt like that scene from The Poltergeist where the man is standing over the sink in front of the mirror, ripping his skin off his face piece by piece. Sorry, is that too graphic? We then realized that the prior owners or the owners before them had gotten lazy and painted over wallpaper. It was crazy to find out that way. Usually it's so obvious that you can see the seams of the wallpaper through the paint, but they must have put at least 4 coats of paint over it.
Some of it came off really easily with the edge of the spackle knife, and some took a little more elbow grease, hot water, and vinegar. My mom, Nate and I spent a good two weeks - the two weeks we had planned to paint every single room- getting the kitchen walls down to the plaster (and in some places, dry wall where the addition was added). Whichever devil had put the wallpaper up had also put the hot pink textured sizing to help the wallpaper adhere to the wall, which ended up showing through our paint.
I felt manic. It was so incredibly frustrating and draining to work on making the kitchen walls look good and then when it came down to it- it still looked horrible. Normally, I would have preferred to try a DIY technique, but we were all so tired of looking at these walls that we opted to have a professional come in and skim coat the walls to perfection.
It was so so
so worth it.
Now we have our walls smooth and painted. It looks much better and brighter, it almost doesn't seem like the same space. We still have a bit to do in the kitchen- finish painting the window trim, eventually replace the back splash, hang art and style the space. Once that is all done, I'll post a big reveal of how our kitchen turned out!
