Stairwell and Hallway Progress part 1

Ok so when I last posted about the hallway and stairwell makeover it was mid April! To jog your memory, the stairwell and the upstairs hallway had some dark green and gold wallpaper all over it. This is a before picture

I detailed the removal of the hallway wall paper here. After successfully accomplishing removing the wall paper in the hallway, I decided to tackle the stairwell. I was planning on using the same method that I used in the hallway. However, the stairwell is about 20 plus feet tall so it was slightly more intimidating. I figured I'd start at the bottom and go as far as I could reach on a ladder and have John scrape the remaining off for me.

To my complete surprise and joy, when I began to pull the wall paper up from the bottom THE WHOLE SHEET came gently off the wall from the floor to the 20 foot high ceiling! I was so excited that I began pulling off all the wallpaper from the ground up. It took a total of 30 minutes to rip it all off. Both the top layer of the wallpaper and the bottom layer came of in smooth large sheets. However, there were some small patches of the under layer that stuck to the wall shown below.

Since these spots were up close to the ceiling, John built a scaffolding system out of old pallets. He used the Chomper spray to scrap off the remaining pieces.

But finally all the wallpaper is finally off! The pictures of the hallway and stairwell scraped are below. It already looks better.

Big improvement considering it looked like this before

My happiness about finishing a job in 30 minutes that I thought was going to take hours was quickly diminished when I pull down a section of wall paper and it revealed a large piece of moldy messed up drywall. You can see it just above the light fixture in the picture below. I wish I got more pictures because the picture below is actually after some cleaning. The mold (gross!) was on the drywall all the way down to the window trim. Luckily I was able to use some bleach spray and it came off easily.

However the messed up drywall pointed to a bigger problem- we had a leak in our roof and it had been leaking behind the wallpaper for who knows how long. So John got on the roof and investigated. He discovered that 1 shingle had a hole in it. Thankfully, he was able to use some roofing tar to patch the one shingle. After he patched it we waited for it to rain to see if the patch was sufficient before we went ahead and repaired the drywall. This was in early May this year and of course since we needed it to rain, Arkansas has had one of the longest droughts in the last several years. It is the end of July and we have still yet to have a really good rain storm when we are home to check to see if it patched well enough. More on that later.

So while we were waiting for it to rain during the past couple of months I decided to pick a paint color and paint everything except for the damaged drywall. Easy right? Not at all. This turned out to be a long drawn out super hard process. Some much so that it needs it own post. I'll post on that part later.