I’ve noticed that wallpaper is making a big comeback.  I get it, wallpaper can be gorgeous.  It can add so much interest to a room, and it also can hide a multitude of sins on 100 year old plaster walls.

I was a new homeowner the last time wallpaper was ‘in’, and I pretty much wallpapered every. single. room. in our house.  I even wallpapered the ceiling in our bathroom (never again).

But in the decades since then, I’ve also stripped all of that wallpaper back off.  And that was no fun.  Well … except the time my bff, her daughter and her daughter’s bff helped me strip the three layers of wallpaper in our master bedroom.  We did actually have fun, and that job would have taken forever on my own.

The last bit of wallpaper we had in our house was in our dining room.  There are two squares of wall in that room on either side of the windows, the rest of the walls (and ceiling for that matter) are clad in reclaimed barn wood.

The wallpaper was pretty subtle.  It was a beige-ish color with slightly darker colored writing on it.

A while back (and by a while back, I mean in 2017) I decided that I wanted to remove it and paint those squares white to bring a little more light into the room.  At the time I was really hoping this would be an easy removal job.  After all, those square aren’t that big, it’s not like I had an entire room to do.

Sometimes wallpaper comes off really easily, just start tugging at a corner and you can pull it away in practically full sized sheets.  And sometimes it doesn’t.  This wallpaper was in the latter camp.  It seemed to have a vinyl layer with the design on it, and a paper layer underneath.  When I tugged, the vinyl layer came off leaving the paper layer still glued to the wall.

I still had my full time job at that time, plus the blog, and honestly, I just didn’t want to deal with stripping that wallpaper.  But now I had a big chunk of that upper layer of the wallpaper torn off.  So I decided to cover it up with vintage paper player piano music rolls instead.

  That was back in September 2017 (you can read all about it here).

That was supposed to be a temporary measure, just until I could get around to a full fledged strip job.  Uh, yeah, six years went by with those rolls on the wall.  How did that happen?  Clearly I am just really good at procrastinating!

The winter before last I decided that I would focus on getting some projects done inside the house.  Surely that would be a great way to get through the winter while we’re stuck inside anyway.  I could finally get this wallpaper down.  And maybe our front stairwell painted.  Or maybe the baseboards upstairs.  I definitely need to repaint inside all of our closets, and our kitchen cupboards.

Yet that entire winter went by  and I hadn’t done a single one of the projects on that list.  Somehow I always managed to find something else I’d rather do.

But one rainy day in March 2023 I decided enough was enough with the procrastinating.  That player piano music, and the wallpaper under it, was coming down!

After removing the player piano music, and all of the many staples that held it in place, I then peeled off all of the outer vinyl layer of the wallpaper.  Then I had to go back and wet down the paper backing layer and scrape it off.

  None of it came off in big chunks, but bit by bit I got it all off.

You might be inclined to think that I then jumped right into giving those walls a fresh coat of paint, but no.  I managed to procrastinate on that for another entire year!

What was I waiting for?  Well, to be honest, I was trying to come up with a fabulous wall treatment for those two squares.  Something exciting that would be ‘blog worthy’.  Maybe a hand-painted mural a la Miss Mustard Seed.

Or possibly an all-over stencil of some kind.

But in the end those sort of treatments just didn’t feel quite right for this room with its rustic barnwood cladding.

So I spent another rainy (seriously, it just won’t quit) morning a few weeks back just painting those bits of wall white.

I say ‘morning’, but it literally only took about an hour or so, not even a full morning.

So yeah, they’re just plain white, nothing terribly exciting, but at least they are presentable now.  Maybe the white will be the perfect blank canvas for something more exciting down the road.  Then again, maybe these walls will just stay white.

How about you?  Do you have projects that you’ve procrastinated on for years?  Surely I’m not the only queen of procrastination around here, am I?