March & April's project

I started removing the ugly wallpaper in March (see my past post What will be February's project? for a "before" photo of the wallpapered wall), and we finally got around to painting a coat of primer on the wall this past weekend. It looks a million times better!

Painting itself goes really fast, but preparing a wall for painting is a lot of work. Here's what we did...

First, we scored the wallpaper with a utility knife, then sprayed it with a vinegar and water solution to help dissolve the glue behind it. Then we scraped the paper off the wall.



Of course, nothing goes as planned -- the bottom of the wallpaper had been plastered over, so when the paper came off, so did part of the wall. Yippee!

The next step was to repair the wall, which took a few coats of plaster, with drying time and sanding in between. We also filled in gaps between the trim and the wall with acrylic latex adhesive = more drying time (but no sanding -- yay!).



After lots more sanding and cleaning, we finally got to paint (just the primer coat so far -- we still need to buy the final paint colour)!



It really looks a lot better than before. And an added bonus was that we got to preview what the hallway would look like if we painted it white. It's actually a HUGE improvement over that Cheese Whiz orange colour that's on the surrounding walls, and it makes the dark hallway seem so much brighter.

This home improvement project has really been an eye opening experience. I realized that the existing colours in our house are giving me sensory overload. It was such a relief to finally see a plain, clean, white wall. This provides motivation to paint other walls and rooms with lighter colours. Almost every room in the house is painted a very saturated colour, some of which I've had a strong dislike for since the beginning, but now I'm really starting to hate in comparison to our new white wall.

The kitchen is a greenish-yellow, made more sickly-looking by the fluorescent lighting in the room. It is an unpleasant colour that makes me feel uncomfortable. I hope to cover it up soon with a more soothing colour. But first, we have to move the hole for the exhaust fan and do some electrical work in that room...

There's lots more to do, but I think this stairwell has given us the hope and encouragement we've needed to keep at it. I am looking forward to more of this positive reinforcement!

Update on the gutter repair

The day after I repaired the gutters, we had rain (which means the adhesive didn't have enough time to fully cure), then the temperature dropped the day after that.

You can see in the photo an icicle hanging down from one of the poorly patched holes. Sigh.


Although I clearly didn't do a great job of patching the holes, it seems to have helped enough in reducing the amount of water that splashes down on to the porch and the garden below. So, that's good enough for me.

Once the weather is more consistently warm and dry, I will need to find someone to replace the gutters and the soffits and fascia and whatever that thing's called on the edges of the roof dormer where animals had chewed holes a couple of years ago. Although wood looks nicer, I think I'm going to go for aluminum.

Any recommendations?