Beautiful? Ugly?

It’s amazing how something so beautiful can turn into something so ugly. Take wallpaper, for instance. Fifteen years ago, with great exhilaration, I covered my mismatched off-white painted and wood paneled laundry room walls with beautiful wallpaper. It had a cream colored background, with blue vertical lacey stripes on either side of rows of country red stenciled apples. And better yet, I found it on the clearance rack at the hardware store! Finally, I could stand in the center of my laundry room, turn a complete circle and see only one continuous pattern of this beautiful wallpaper, no matter which way I turned.

Today, in continuation of the kitchen and laundry room remodel I started a couple weeks ago, I started removing the old wallpaper. The strips above the washer and dryer came off in big sheets. A little spray of water softened up the remaining paper backing and it peeled off in sheets almost as big. Rounding the corner towards the half bath, getting the peeling started was the hardest part. I found that if I held my putty knife at a slight angle, I could start tearing a section that also peeled off pretty easily. I also found that if I held it at too much of an angle, the point of the putty knife would dig into the drywall and make a hole. By now I was working up a sweat.

The last wall was where I really started hating this ugly wallpaper. This wall was built and covered with unpainted drywall.

I remember someone telling me once that you should always prime and paint new drywall before you cover it with wallpaper. That seemed like such a waste of money, time and effort to me. I guess that must be why I just wallpapered right over the new drywall. I certainly wasn’t thinking ahead fifteen years in the future when I might want to remove the wallpaper. After all, this wallpaper was so beautiful I must have planned on keeping it up forever.

The ugly wallpaper finally came off the unpainted drywall after an hour or more of scraping it inch by inch, re-soaking it with water from my spray bottle, and scraping some more. Sweat was dripping down my forehead and I was covered in little flecks of wallpaper gone wild.

My arms and legs are sore, my back and neck are aching. Yet, I’m celebrating the fact that I finally got rid of the ugly apple wallpaper.

Behind it I am looking at the off-white painted wall, leftover from years ago, and I’m thinking – isn’t it beautiful?