Discovering Wallpaper

We've been in the house just 2 months - since Thanksgiving. We have: a brand new roof, new gutters,repaired the outlet for the dryer, repaired the ceiling plaster and painted the second floor living room, watched/watching the second floor bath ceiling droop (water), held 2 dinner parties, built a few fires in the foyer fireplace, unpacked innumerable boxes and even created a plan for the basement apartment - that we need to scrap and redo.

... and we also have spent some time since Christmas (now and then) scraping the layers of paint, sand and wallpaper off the music room walls.

How do you know its original?
From what I see, there were 3 layers of paint on the original wallpaper in the room. The final blue layer was paint mixed with sand and ruined my knuckles every time I walked by. The paper was pasted directly onto the raw plaster–never painted.Its not pretty and chalky and smooth like most plaster you think of ... its kind of rough and pitted and shows some trowel marks. But in pulling it off, I get to see the room as it was shortly after the house was built - that's pretty exciting to me. 

Interestingly, while casually reading reprints of nineteenth century architectural renderings (which include things like colors and textures to be included in the house) I noticed notations for "plaster finished for wallpaper" or "hard white 3-coat plaster." Now, in stripping the paper off the plaster walls it was evident to me that these walls were just never finished super smooth to be painted. So from my really limited observation (mine and my neighbors houses) and the architectural reprints, I am going to officially surmise that these walls were intended to be papered form the get-go.

During my 6-hour home inspection there were moments of boredom while Russ the Inspector shuttled himself onto the roof looking for crummy shingles and loose chimney stones. 

The 3 inch tall patch of paper and paint that I snapped off during the home inspection. Strangely, it was repaired when we did the walk thru and I subsequently yanked it back off ...

Tough photo to take, but this is what sanded paint looks like. It's sharp,  thick, and very tough to eradicate. 

I was pacing in the parlor and saw a small turned up edge on the wall near the baseboard ... so I flipped it up. I wanted to see what was under it. I didn't know it would be so brittle as to break right off in my hand. but I did see that there was plaster under there ... and an odd maroon smear that I couldn't quite figure out. So I knelt down and looked closer at the plaster and saw that the maroon smear was overlapped stain from the wood baseboard. WOW ... I don't even own the house and I am learning from her. I then spent an hour trying to get the little scrap of paper to stick to the wall, including the old standby, "spit and hold in place."

Matthew easily pulling the dried up paper off the wall in large sheets. some at the top stuck, other areas, where the paper was repaired and filled with drywall spackle, were stuck pretty good. I think they used plastic model cement to glue it down.

About half of the wallpaper lifted off in huge sheets with just a plastic putty knife the glue was so dried up. Some areas just didn't budge. Against my better judgement, and figuring by this point that I would be skim coating the walls, I grabbed the metal scraper and headed for the stuck stuff. 

I was able to scrape off about 1/2 of what was left (1/4 of the total) using the metal putty knife and a wiggle technique to slooooooowwwwwwllllllyyyyyyy chisel away at the stuck tight paper. After testing some areas, I realized that the final 1/4 didn't have paper beneath, so I left it. 

Heres a typical pattern of stuck on paper. The top section had a border (I could not soak it off the paint) and was stuck on tighter than the wall area. The vertical seams must have been glued back down before they painted the first time with some crazy stuck kind of glue (It looked like model cement.)

End of day one - all the missing paper came off easily - no water needed. Yeah, thats garland hanging on the window on the left. We always start our projects without clearing out the room so they will prove extra frustrating and create tons more work having to clean everything that got dirty.

Through all of this I wondered if I could ever see what the original paper looked like. So I tried soaking a large sheet in plain water overnight. The next morning, to my surprise, I was able to peel away the paint from the wallpaper in a fairly large segment - maybe I'm lucky it was all latex paint. The back side of the paint had the image of the wallpaper imprinted into it. It is exciting to have discovered under the paint the original 1906 wallpaper that graced the "music room" (so oral tradition says) of the house.

The paper is like craft paper - tan and kind of rough and unfinished - and has a block or cylinder printed (more likely) white paisley-scroll-like design.

This weekend I finished washing the walls and patching holes. Next step is sanding all the walls, priming, then, GULP, skim coating. Sure I'm nervous, but I'm in ... I own a 62 pound/5 gallon bucket of mud, a drill attachment stirrer, and a magic trowel ...

Still wet, it was very exciting to see the paper with the paint removed.

detail of paper

This is how much I was able to save.

Some stable cracking that was uncovered.

baseboard showing how the stain and finish overlapped onto the plaster.

above the main archway trim. left side is cleaned of paper residue left after scraping, right side needs to be wet and wiped down.

just funny that someone had to write this down ...