The final nail in the coffin of what used to be our living room: getting rid of the old wallpaper. Now this wallpaper had all the looks of being a more feisty opponent than what we had removed so far, so we came prepared.
First we picked up some new weaponry to add to our inventory: a spiked roller. Together with the block brush, the scraper knife and a putty knife this should be all we need to tackle our latest adversary.
And of course a bucket and a whisk to make the very dilluted wallpaper glue (add ten times more water than the box says, or ten times less glue), just as we did before (why change a winning recipe).
We had two different kinds of wallpaper to remove. The first one is called “rice paper” over here, has some kind of bubbly structure in it and is specifically made to be painted over. Since the paint doesn’t let any water through, we needed to perforate it first. That’s where the spiked roller came into play. It still came off in two layers half of the time because of its structure.
Underneath the wallpaper we could see the original painted plaster appear again (the green you see in the picture below, on the left).
The other paper was some kind of brown paper with these fibres attached to it, really weird, and hard to get rid off. The fibres came loose first, leaving this brown paper behind that needed soaking really well before it wanted to come off.
In the end we managed to get rid of it all (minor specks not taken into account), and as before we got some surprises that became visible. Remember that big ass fireplace? Turns out they did a design study first. On the wall.
Don’t you just love these kind of surprises?