The plan was, take a week off, decorate and then relax for the last two days. Which actually turned into three days as we accidentally booked our week off to coincide with a bank holiday. Result! What could possibly go wrong? Well plenty as it transpires...
Well, we had a plan. But it proved impossible to stick to. First of all, we started bright and early on Saturday morning with a plan to strip the walls in a few hours, but it immediately became apparent that this was not going to happen. Rose decreed that we needed a wallpaper stripper so I set off to pick one up from Market Harborough (thus wasting an hour) and then after ten minutes use decided it was a waste of time because a) the paint on the wallpaper was sealing it and the steam wasn't really getting through, and/or b) every time I used it the wallpaper seemed to take huge chunks of plaster with it when I pulled it off.
So we set that aside and spent the whole weekend stripping the all the wallpaper. Then came the job of filling all the holes we'd made pulling the wallpaper off. Some of these were quite small and so not a big deal, but there were some larger patches, notably near the dining table and these were quite difficult. Being that we were using blown vinyl (renowned for it's ability to cover up bumpy walls) I figured as long as I did a reasonable job of filling and smoothing the plaster the wallpaper would hide the imperfections well.
After that came sanding and painting the woodwork and the dado rail. And it surprised me just how runny the Valspar wood paint we'd bought was. It had to go on really thin or it just ran and I had to sand several places and redo them. But this was just the start. We went out for dinner on Tuesday night and while we felt the schedule had slipped at this point we still thought that the bank holiday would be our day off. Yeah, right.
I finally started wallpapering on Wednesday afternoon about 2pm. I finished wallpapering about 12:30AM, having finished the dining room and perhaps a quarter of the lounge. But the next morning it was starkly obvious that my plastering was not as smooth as I thought and the rather thin wallpaper wasn't going to cover the imperfections anything like as well as was hoped.
We decided the only thing to do was strip the walls, take the rest of the wallpaper back and get some better stuff. You would think the wallpaper would come off easy wouldn't you? I mean, it was barely dry. But you would be dead wrong. The paper might have been shit, but the wallpaper paste was doing it's job extremely well and we spent Thursday and Friday getting the room back to where we had been on Wednesday afternoon.
Not surprisingly, by now we were not in the best of moods, but I papered all Saturday and Sunday and by Sunday night the papering was finished. Yay. I mean how long could it take to paint two rooms? Well about 5 fucking weeks as it turned out. No I can't believe it either. It went on and on, and it just felt like it would never end.
Well it didn't help that we almost finished and THEN decided that actually we should have bought matt paint instead of silk. The thought of starting again was horrendous, but we both hated it and what was the point of finishing it and hating it? So we went back to B&Q and spent another £150 on paint... before starting the whole process all over again.
As expected the 'Arch of Satan' was a nightmare, that on it's own took four or five evening to finish papering and paint. I must say it looks bloody excellent now, but what a fucking nightmare!!!
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