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This week, we partnered with TraceDesigns to bring you a fun and easy way to perk up your walls. Up for grabs: any stencil on this page. We like TraceDesigns stencils because they’re made from recycled, non-toxic materials and they’re simple to use. Tape the stencil to your wall, trace the design and then paint it however you like.
This week, we want to know: What’s your biggest wall-covering horror story? Ever bought a house with a paint job gone wrong? Have you ever had to remove someone else’s disastrous wallpaper? Let us know in the comments. You have until 12 noon ET on Monday to answer. Click here for the official rules.
Never had a problem with wallpaper in the the house we bought, but brick walls in kitchen, old vinyl flooring and other older built houses problems i can talk about.
In my college days I moved into a (cheap) apartment that had a ceiling painted light powder blue, with soft clouds and…. cherubs, I kid you not… The property manager kept apologizing about it and said that he would 'fix' it, but the funny thing is that the whole thing sort of grew on me and I never made him paint over it! Someone had put a lot of effort into it, and I couldn't bring myself to undo all that work!… true story.
http://cheapwallart.net
My favorite wall disaster was a college townhome we purchased with footprints on ceilings and bike tracks up the kitchen wall. We actually added wallpaper to the kitchen as it was the only way to cover the tracks.
A roommate took a sharpie and traced someones body on the white wall in the living room. It was a permanent marker. I was only 18. I moved back in with mom and step dad until I could pay for what I didn't do!
I ran really low on wallpaper in my kitchen and had to use the sample I had from the company. They had put tiny pin holes all throughout the sample of the paper, so I used it behind the refrigerator.
I had to rent a steamer and use tons of steel wool to remove 4 layers of paper, not vinyl, wallpaper when I first moved into my home.
My worst wallpaper removal experience was in a 1970's house. They must not have primed the walls, so the sheetrock came off in places along with the 2 layers of wallpaper. So I put up a textured wallpaper after priming over the mess. Then decided to sell the house & had to take the wallpaper off for a neutral palette and ended up using one and a half 5 gallon buckets of "mud" to make the walls smooth. As Nancy Kerrigan said – WHY ME?!
I bought my first home (which I am still living in) the previous owners smoked and the wallpaper was sticky from nicotine. I could not stand to touch it. Even with gloves, it just felt sticky. I had to scrub the walls down before I could take the wallpaper off. The wallpaper was yellow, orange and brown vertical stripes! The process took forever. The smell made me queezy.
When we moved into our home, all the walls were "builder" white. It was so drab. We painted every wall and now our home has life!
I bought a home with the kitchen walls covered from the ceiling halfway down the walls with squares of wood stained to look like an old shingled cabin inside–when tearing these out to redo the walls, because it was a small breeding ground for critters–I found they were attached at the top to 4×8 sheets of plywood shoved at an angle into the attic of the roof–I not only had to use gallons of kilz to prep the walls, but had to drywall the top of the wall where it met the ceiling–What a disaster but beautifully opened up afterwards with exposed beams.
I loved my red door, until my next door neighbor painted their door the same exact color. Totally unoriginal and I could no longer say "its the tan house with the red door" followed by some cheesy red district joke. I was pissed. So I decided to find a new original color no one on the block had, I went with a bright blue I had seen on some cute craftsmen style homes. Bad idea, the color only looks good when surrounded by other houses with equally bright colors. It looked so bad the next day when I was outside my neighbors across the street handed me a book of paint colors and offter to help pick something else!
Like others here….removing, patching, repairing, and re-doing wallpapered walls. It's a nightmare but the finished projects are a dream.
My worst wall clean up was in a rental, before I moved out I had agreed to remove or paint over a large mural I had drawn on the wall of my son's room. Young and unexperienced I had drawn it on the wall with permanent marker! It took about ten coats or more of paint to cover it up! Lesson learned!