Okay, so maybe I’m not as fast a learner as I should be. What’s rule #1 of home renovation? It should be “Don’t tear off wallpaper unless you are fully prepared to re-hang drywall.” Case in point: When we bought our current house, the living room walls looked like this:

Fine, we’ll just paint and it will all be fine, right? Wrong. Underneath, the walls looked like this:

Oh, I’m sorry, you can’t see what’s really there? Look closer:

Two rooms worth of new drywall and $1700 later we had a lovely living room that didn’t make our eyes hurt. Lesson learned? Perhaps not. Here we are, two and a half years later, and I decided to tackle our dining room, shown here the day we moved in:

Now this makes my eyes hurt every day. Who would purpose to make a room this dark? We’ve got well over 200 watts of light bulbs in this room and we still can’t see our dinner. I decide we’re going to paint this room to brighten it up a bit. Okay, a lot. Except there’s one problem. There’s some sort of industrial adhesive holding the wallpaper to the wall. It’s like the house is clinging to it, relying on the wallpaper for structural integrity. And then I get this dose of bad news. Wall #1 is finally free of wallpaper, so I start on wall #2. Except this wall is not sheetrock. I don’t even know what material it is, it feels like cardboard. It’s some sort of wallboard made from a paper based material. Boy does this thing soak up the steam. I’m doing my best, people, but this house has it in for me. And I know for a fact that two of these walls are plaster, so that’s going to be even more fun. One room, three different wall materials, that’s going to look great, isn’t it? If there’s butt-ugly wallpaper on the walls, there’s probably a reason nobody took it down.
People Laughing at Dinner