Removing Ugly Old Wallpaper

BEFORE

My husband spent a few hours working on getting rid of the ugly old wallpaper on the kitchen ceiling. As you can see in the BEFORE picture, we had attempted to take it down a while back. We pulled off one strip of the vinyl paper and the backing just dropped a tremendous bunch of dust down everywhere. So we decided it was best to wait till the kitchen was cleared out. After the rest of the demo, we pealed off the vinyl sheets, leaving a layer of the woven backing still on the ceiling. He used a spray bottle of water & white vinegar, let it soak in a while & scraped it off with a paint scraper. Thanks honey, so so happy to see that ugly stuff go!

Kitchen Renovation Project About to Begin

Kitchen Renovation Project About to Begin
Well we’ve signed the contracts and the kitchen renovation / house rewiring project will be starting soon.  It’s going to be quite a mess here for who knows how long. I have to clear all the art work off the walls, pack up all the small stuff & move all the furniture to the center of the rooms to access all the electrical outlets & switches for the rewire. Then after that, the demo of the kitchen will begin. We can’t wait to clear out those rotten old cabinets & the old floor. But I’m not looking forward to the hassle of peeling that disgusting wallpaper off the ceiling (what were my in-laws thinking when they put that up there?)

Repairing Vintage Wallpaper with Inkjet Canvas

This is how I repaired/replaced some vintage wallpaper in our tiny bathroom.
While having new windows installed, we discovered termite and wood rot damage to the bathroom window frame & wall. The damage extended along the upper part of the wall so we needed to knock it out to replace the studs & frame. But this meant removing the lovely art nouveau wallpaper that was my favorite part of the bathroom. I shopped around and online, looking for vintage patterns or anything black & white that might match, but couldn’t find anything appropriate. It was the wall directly across from the doorway so it would have looked odd without wallpaper. Tile extends 2/3 up the wall & the section of wall was only about 4’ wide, so it wasn’t a large section. It was vinyl wallpaper, so I attempted carefully to scrape it off and save it. Of course that didn’t go as well as expected and I ended up with many tiny fragments.

The wallpaper had an open weave cloth backing. I began to tape together the fragments of wallpaper on the front side and then glued cheesecloth to the back to hold them together. I only had one section about 20”x30” that was too broken up to reuse.
I was shopping for photo paper for my husband when I came across canvas made for inkjet printers. I came up with the idea of printing the design on it (I had seen pages from an old Sears Catalog used as wallpaper) so I figured the canvas would paste up well and the texture matched the existing wallpaper very well. I began placing the better sections on the scanner and scanning into jpg format. I had to edit parts of the image to fill in the damaged areas. I was then able to print out 8 ½”x11” sections. Luckily the design of overlapping illustrations gave me lots of places to form seam between the small prints. Somehow the new window & frame ended up narrower than the original, so I also needed to create two small strips to border each side of the window. In one of my many art books I found an Aubrey Beardsley design that went nicely. I scanned & printed those out too.
Then I thought about it going up in a moist and steamy room and that the ink might not hold up. I tried painting some polyurethane on one of the scrap portions but the ink bled. I then started researching to see if there was a product made for sealing injet prints. There was, but at $20 dollars per can & only available online, I didn’t want to wait. So I ended up buying clear coat spray with UV protection. I tested it out on another scrap, let it dry and glued it to a scrap of drywall. Looked great. But when I pasted up the real pieces ink bled. I think I used too much glue and got it too wet from the under side, which I hadn’t sprayed. I wasn’t going to remove it and try again, not that big a section anyway. So if you try it, clear coat both sides before gluing & use the glue sparingly.