Done.

I did it. I finally finished scraping the wallpaper off my kitchen walls. It may seem that this shouldn't have been such a big job, but it was. I decided to wallpaper the kitchen when we had our house built some fifteen years ago. The man we hired to hang the paper used a bit of overkill in the job. Although the paper was pre-pasted and only should have needed water to hang it with, he decided to go ahead and paste it again, just to make sure it didn't come down. I watched as he applied gallon after gallon of paste to the back of strip after strip of wallpaper, thinking all the while to myself, "Wow, that's going to be hard to take down some day!"

I was right. It was glued onto the kitchen walls like concrete. Typically, you can pull the top layer of wallpaper off strip by strip. Not so much in my kitchen. The biggest strip I ever pulled off in one piece was about 6" x 8"; most pieces were about 1" x 2". I tried just about everything anyone recommended and nothing helped. The easiest thing I found was to just drench the paper in hot water, let it soak for a good 5 minutes and start scraping. It's taken me about 3 months of working at a slow and steady pace to get the entire kitchen and breakfast nook done. Now I begin the task of repairing the sheetrock that was underneath the paper, but I must say, it feels really good to finally have accomplished a task I've been laboring at for so long!