After a long night of stripping…

Um, so maybe this post needs a new title. That just sounds wrong. After one night of 4 hours of stripping the paint and wallpaper in our bedroom, here’s the progress on the biggest wall in the room. The one that I thought was going to be the hardest — the plaster-on-brick party wall here — turned out to be the easiest one and in the best shape.

The opposite wall, which is a freestanding plaster wall dividing the bedroom from the bathroom, was not only more difficult to strip, but it’s got some damage to the plaster at the bottom. I think due to past water damage, the cement inside the plaster has dried out, crumbled and then let go of the wood lathe behind it. So the plaster has bulged out, making it imposible to strip the paper there without destroying the wall. It’s like trying to write on a piece of paper stretched tight but without a hard surface behind it.

I think I’m going to have to either rip all the plaster out from a horizontal line down the baseboard and try to replace that section with 3/8″ drywall, or just take out all the plaster and put up new drywall on the entire wall.

Decisions, decisions.