<p>I really love wallpaper, but now that I’m 3 days into this scraping exercise, I may also say never! Candice Olsen uses large scale almost monochromatic prints for accent walls, and they always look gorgeous. But yes, there can be some truly hideous stuff. </p>
<p>Counting down, if the damage to your drywall is really superficial - just the top layer peeling off to reveal brown paper, you might get by with a product I’ve used in the past to seal the drywall. It’s called Gardz, IIRC. It’s a clear liquid that goes on quickly, and you just paint over it. </p>
<p>dstark - so sorry about your deck! And for your wood wall, did the contractor talk about doing a skim coat over that instead of drywall. Very quick and cheap, for the right application.</p>
<p>vballmom, I’m laughing hysterically - I just peeked at the pictures of the straw-covered walls. I think I saw that episode of Trading Spaces where Hildi went wild.</p>
<p>wall paper, etc. Ow, I am having flashbacks!</p>
<p>foil paper in the bath, large pink cabbage roses on burgundy in the entry- beautifully reflected by the gold-veined mirror tiles on the ceiling, giant red paisley paper in the kitchen set off by the red SHAG carpet (yes, in the kitchen!), dirty pepto bismol colored carpet every where else… I’ll stop but you get the idea.</p>
<p>How we ever saw the house in spite of the “decor,” I don’t know. And it was only because we were clueless that we tackled the undoing of the decor.</p>
<p>“dstark - so sorry about your deck! And for your wood wall, did the contractor talk about doing a skim coat over that instead of drywall. Very quick and cheap, for the right application.”</p>
<p>Too late…</p>
<p>I think I like the paint contractor I hired though…</p>
<p>Good prices and they have 9 people working in my house at once…</p>
<p>They are quick. :)</p>
<p>Yeah…the aggregate deck…i don’t know what I am going to do…first the drain has to be repaired…</p>
<p>The door… The new door has a lifetime guarantee…and the salesman looked and acted like Don Knotts…</p>
<p>CountingDown, go rent a steamer! When we tried to remove the wallpaper in our house, we found out that it had been papered without priming the drywall. I hired a guy to remove it, and after 30 minutes of trying to get it off, he came out and said that he couldn’t get the paper off without destroying the walls. We rented a steamer and were able to get the paper off with very little damage. It takes time and patience, but it works.</p>
<p>I wonder if people looking at houses 30 years from now are going to look at our granite and stainless steel kitchens and our spa-like baths with natural stone floors soaking tubs and rubbed bronze fixtures and want to pluck their eyes out, too? Probably so. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>I’ve got yellow/orange formica countertops and medium brown mica cabinets. Also, a double oven and frig with freezer on bottom. Everything works. It will be an expensive job to redo. The countertops are covered by appliances so not so visible. ugh</p>
Maybe. I think most of the problem is in color choices though. Check out the wallpaper and the flooring in that picture, there’s just no refinement or elegance there at all.</p>
<p>My late-60’s house had the original bathrooms - cr*p brown tile, ugly pink tile, and some nasty shade of blue tile. They are now mostly white with some accent colors, and I think this will hold up better over time. Maybe I came kidding myself.</p>
<p>The kitchen had a linoleum floor not quite as bad as in that picture, but pretty bad. Now we have a bamboo floor, which is trendy, but I don’t think wood will go out of style.</p>
<p>The entire house was carpeted in forest green and sky blue shag carpeting, although it could have been worse - my neighbor’s house had purple and orange shag carpeting. :eek: It’s all gone, exposing the beautiful hardwood floors. (Why do people put wall-to-wall carpet over wood floors?) I don’t think (I hope) they will go out of style.</p>
<p>And let’s not even talk about the Harvest Gold and Avocado Green appliances…</p>
<p>-As long as you mentioned the cr*p brown and ugly pink tiled bathroom, I’ll solicit advice on my dilemma. I have one. I was going to try to work with the brown and pink tied together by a kind of cool striped shower curtain. It’s mainly chocolate brown, cream, pink and only a little of the doo doo brown. It could work, but will surely cry out to some buyers as a must-do remodel project. My contractor (my brother) thinks I should spend a couple thousand (hopefully less) to replace the tile, which goes halfway up every wall and all around the tub/shower. Also would be able to update the show from the old brass fixtures, and get a new toilet.I have birdseye maple vanity and birchy looking floors (nice laminate that actually looks good), so I’m thinking of going with that sort of travertine yellow gold brownish tile that is so popular right now.</p>
<p>So whadya think? It’s not going to be a flashy all out remodel, but do you think it should be a priority as we prepare the house for sale? I actually like to remodel, so I have no idea how the average buyer will respond to the bathroom with and without the reno. This is the only room on the main floor that’s not really up to par right now.</p>
In my experience, it is virtually impossible to remove tile from a wall without destroying the walls. So in essence you would be gutting the bathroom. If you can tackle this yourself you might squeeze by for a couple thou, but the fixtures themselves can easily cost over a thou (you will probably need to replace the tub/shower hardware as well).</p>
<p>What color is the tub?</p>
<p>I think the dated bathroom will be a big turnoff, especially if everything else is updated.</p>
<p>The main reason we redid our bathrooms (aside from the colors) was that the grout had failed and water was leaking behind the tile, and the backer board was regular drywall, not cementboard, so the whole thing was falling apart.</p>
<p>Well, that and the mother-in-law wallpaper incident.</p>
<p>Fauxnom: It really depends where you are and what your market is like. In my neck of the woods, people want updated, new, clean and modern. If I wanted, I could update my bathrooms for somewhere in the neighborhood of $75,000 and maybe (maybe!) get that back when I sell. My realtors have told me it’s not worth it, that I should just make sure everything is clean, clean, clean. The new owner can do the bathrooms as he/she wants.</p>
<p>“The main reason we redid our bathrooms (aside from the colors) was that the grout had failed and water was leaking behind the tile, and the backer board was regular drywall, not cementboard, so the whole thing was falling apart.”</p>
<p>I have this exact problem…so we are redoing the bathroom…</p>
Our main bathroom had tile half-way up the walls, and around the tub it went up to about 1 1/2 feet from the ceiling. The non-tiled parts of the walls were papered with an ugly vinyl wallpaper. </p>
<p>Over the years, due to the moisture, a few of the pieces of wallpaper had started to curl up a tiny bit at the bottom, especially around the shower. Not a big deal, it could easily have been glued down.</p>
<p>So my MIL is in the bathroom, and she sees the curled-up edges. So she grabs one… and starts pulling. Since the paper is vinyl on the front, the vinyl part comes off in one giant piece, leaving the backing paper stuck on the wall. She de-vinyl’ed about half the bathroom before she ran out of edges to pull. Uhh… thanks. She couldn’t really explain why she felt it necessary to do this.</p>
<p>I have a ton of these stories, like the time she was watching the kids and we came home only to find she had taken every picture and piece of art on the walls and shelves and moved them around to different locations, or the time we came home to find the contents of every kitchen cabinet on the counter and her busily putting it all back in different cabinets so it would be more “logical”, or…</p>
<p>But I digress. :D</p>
<p>
I like this tile, definitely a huge improvement over cr*p brown.</p>
<p>FauxMom – What about this instead? It’s a transfer that you rub on to the tile after prepping. It may not be a look that you would care for long-term but to get yourself a better looking bathroom without spending a lot…this might be the solution.</p>
<p>My mother is famous in her circle for being the one to call if you want wallpaper removed. She loves it! I don’t tell people much because the words ‘My mom is a stripper’ tends to put people off…</p>
<p>I was just going to say: leave the pink bathroom! Some people love them. I’d make sure it was clean, properly grouted, put in clean cream-colored towels and a cream heavy cotton shower curtain, and leave it at that. If you do a half-***ed job, it’s going to look worse than if you leave it.</p>
![http://www.thekitchendesigner.org/storage/brown%20kitchen034.jpg[/url]](http://www.thekitchendesigner.org/storage/brown%20kitchen034.jpg%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
