Probably One Of the Scariest Things I Have Ever Done…

I had a fun filled weekend of wallpaper glue removal… how about you guys! Seriously I’m not sure, but I think removing glue from walls is on my top 10 “I Don’t Want To Do This Ever Again” job list!

Here is our bathroom before we moved in…

It’s kind of hard to see it but this is the wallpaper that was installed when the house was built 13 years ago. It was still in great condition, but just not our style…

The wallpaper came down so easy, I thought I was lucky!

Huge strips of paper and it only took me like 30 minutes of pulling it off (by hand) to get it down! I was so very excited and I thought I had it made, well that was a big NOPE! Removing the glue left on the walls behind the paper was a killer… thankfully my hubby helped me get it done this weekend (he hated it to BTW)! After researching how to get the wallpaper glue off of the walls the process we used was this:

• Tip: put on some rubber gloves or your hands will look like crap later!
• with a spray bottle spray a small section (3ft. x 3ft.) with a 50/50 mix of vinegar and water, start off with warm water but it’s ok if it cools down
• let it soak in for about 15 seconds and then scrape the glue off with a metal or plastic scraper (being careful not to tear the sheetrock paper as much as possible)
• repeat the step above once more
• fill a bucket with hot/warm water (as hot as you can handle it), using a heavy duty scrubbing sponge (we used the yellow ones with the green scrub side to them) scrub and rinse the remaining glue residue off.
• keep emptying and refilling the bucket so that the water stays as clean as possible

There are other tutorials out there that say that Fabric Softener will work too, but here’s my thoughts on that. 1. Vinegar is so much cheaper and is a natural product 2. You are actually cleaning your walls at the same time (my bathroom has never been so clean) 3. Fabric Softener has petroleum in it and I am wondering about the effect of that 4. Vinegar smells a lot worse than fabric softener, but refer back to concern #3

We broke this fun time up into two half days, it’s Fall ya’ll and we had some fun outdoor stuff to do, but we got all of the glue off of the walls and were left with more than a few holes.

Then, because I thought we needed to do more, I decided I wanted to go ahead and take down the 2 HUGE mirrors on “my” side of the bathroom. Seriously who needs this much mirror in the bathroom!?

So this was the very scary, almost peed in my pants part I alluded to in my title post! Taking these mirrors down was freaking me out! I researched on line how to get remove them, as they are glued to the wall versus put on with mirror clips, and this is the process we used.

First of all it is SUPER important to wear safety glasses, gloves and I had on long pants and shoes… you never know if the mirror will break or shatter so please be careful!

As suggested we taped the mirrors up with heavy duty packing tape.

We oh so carefully and slowly pried the mirror off if the wall using wood shims and a small crow bar. Let me tell you these mirrors are at least a 1/4” thick and HUGE, but we got both of them down in one piece. However this is the mess they left behind…

Anyone else up for a fun day of drywall patching & sanding… UGH!!! I did get a couple of coats on last night, but seriously what a pain!

We still have one more very HUGE mirror on my hubby’s side but we are leaving that for now as this makeover is a temporary fix until we can renovate the whole bathroom. I personally am hoping that we hire this mirror removal out!

We also solved one more bathroom problem that I would like to share with you. We have a pocket door to the water closet / shower “room”, I know weird that they put those 2 things together right? Well the pocket door wouldn’t open all of the way, it stuck out of the wall about 4” and was just a slight nuisance. I could tell that something was keeping it from closing on the bottom track. At first I thought it might be a screw or nail from the baseboards, so I removed the front and back baseboard, but that didn’t solve the problem. So I decided to cut a hole behind the baseboard (where the stop was occurring) to see if I could figure out the problem. Once I put the baseboard back up you’ll never know there is a hole there.

These are what I found…

Someone’s kids stuck these in between the pocket door and the jamb at some point… Kids really will stick things almost anywhere! I pulled them out and now the door opens all of the way, a small victory but it made us happy that it wasn’t a huge fix for us.

Well I’m off to patch more holes and probably do some sanding! Have a great week all!

Thanks for stopping by…

Until next time!