(And this is actually an open letter only directed to the folks who previously owned MY home. And I am entirely skipping the grandparents' ownership, although there is not sufficient evidence to indicate whether or not they had a hand in this too... But the parts where I get verbally abusive are not directed at my grandparents, they were good folks. That said, let's just launch into it.)
You ASSHATS!! Your cockshinery and blatant laziness is going to cost me way more time, sweat, and money than would have otherwise been necessary!
First off... I'm pretty sure that you were drunk when you went to pick out your wallpaper. How else would you be able to explain the eagle, lantern, powder horn, laurel branch, rooster, and schoolhouse pattern you seem to have originally picked? There is no excuse for that mess. NONE. And don't you dare give me, "Oh, it was just lovely at the time!" Because I am calling shenanigans on your asses! You were drunk, or you were going for some kind of "folksy-americana-traditional" or you were deliberately trying to make some kind of satirical statement with your wallpaper selection. And let me just say that if it was the latter, then you are even bigger idiots than I gave you credit for, as there are and were better ways to make satirical statements than with your selection of wallpaper in your suburban Indiana kitchen.
Secondly, it appears that in between the first and second rounds of wallpaper you decided it would be a great idea to put plaster over the wallpaper. How in god's creation you managed to get that to work is a mystery in the physics of plaster and wallpaper, but you did it. And after you did it, you appeared to leave that plaster naked and apply a new layer of hideous wallpaper over it. Turquoise floral and diamond patterned paper? REALLY? This is marginally better than your first choice, but I am pretty sure you were still a little buzzed when making that selection too.
The selections were bad enough, but then you apparently elected to paint over that mess... And somewhere along the line, someone decided that wasn't going to do, so you started to scrape at some of it. But in a consistent run of amateur moves, you scraped haphazardly, and DEEPLY gouging out not only the paint, plaster, and bad wallpaper you put up, but also the plaster walls! This leaves all future attempts at any finish other than wallpaper pretty much out of the question unless we are willing to dump god knows how many paychecks into getting this problem solved properly.
And then there is the half-bath... Good God! The bottom-most layer appears to be a shade of paint that resembles "Tiffany blue" which would be fine in small doses, but doesn't seem to pair all that well with the seafoam green tiles you have in there. You painted over that with white, which was arguably a better choice and I would have been fine with. But then you wallpapered over that with a pattern of ferns and grasses, and palm fronds... Again, I don't know how those greens ever went with the seafoam tile, but hey, what do I know? Apparently, you agreed with me at some point and painted white over that mess... And while white would've been fine, YOU PAINTED THE WALLPAPER AGAIN! Come on! Do you really hate all of humanity THAT MUCH? The white paint was then covered with a floral pattern of wallpaper... Not the worst choice, but hell, if I want to see flowers, you know where I think I should go? (Hint: It's not the bathroom!)
Basically, you can see I am very busy undoing the handiwork of the past. And when I was asked if I would rather just put up wallpaper to cover all of this, my response was, "No. I don't hate anyone that much... Kim Jong Il or Osama Bin Laden could buy this house tomorrow and I still wouldn't have the audacity to wallpaper over this shit!"
A steamer and scraper are the items I will keep close at hand for now... I am very glad that only a few rooms of this place were wallpapered. And I am pretty sure that the full bath has only the one layer... Though I haven't sufficiently peeked under the edges to verify that fact.
I knew going into this that there was work to be done, but undoing the shoddy work that lay hidden underneath all of this for so long is far more than I had initially counted on. It's going to be a LONG LONG road to redemption on this one, I'm afraid.
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