Lucky Dorito

When we moved into this house about 4 years ago, the bedroom that my youngest daughter got was wallpapered in a white paper, with small pink and blue flowers. Luby was young enough that she loved it so it was the one room in the house I’d never really done anything in. (All three bathrooms were papered also – two of them have been stripped and painted – the third is still yet to go. Lucky me.)

So after all this time, I don’t blame Luby for being ready for some changes in her room. I have never liked wallpaper so I was thrilled to finally be getting rid of it!

We used the usual methods, perforating the paper and spraying it down with water and a little Downy. But, it wouldn’t come off easily. After a few hours of minimal progress, I decided to rent a steamer.

Now, I’ve never used a steamer before so it freaked me out a little at first, so…. steamy. It took about 20 minutes for it to get hot enough to make steam.

Once I got the hang of it though, it really made fast work of the paper removal.

It made a serious mess in the floor though. And if that water dripped on you, it hurt like heck. For future reference, I suggest having a big pan handy to set the steamer down in if you need to do so. It dripped continuously and there wasn’t really any place to put it once it was heated up. (I used the big metal pan that I bake turkeys in!)

I got the entire room done in a few hours – which was way faster than what I had been doing before the steamer!

And then, the patching process began. There was a lot of patching to be done, let me tell you. Sheesh.

Everyone helped a little. Moral support, you know.

(See Beebo dodging licks from Sydney – who has the fastest tongue east of the Mississippi?)

After I patched and sanded and patched and sanded some more, I left Mr. Lucky to sand the walls until he was finally satisfied while I meanwhile painted this shelf outside on a big sheet of plastic.

This would be where I learned that valuable lesson about…. the importance of shoes.

It took several coats to even out this yummy chocolate brown. I am pleased with how it turned out in the end… although you can’t really tell in the beginning when spray painting.

Stay tuned, I have more pictures of the rest of the room progress. It’s close to being done now!

And yes, Luby is HAPPY!!

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