What To Do If You Do Not Like Your Kitchen Wallpaper
My husband and I fell in love with our lake home the first time we drove into the yard. What was not to love: the yard was filled with perennial flowers, the walkway between the house and garage was curved and paved, and the view of the lake was spectacular. The house had been remodeled and added on to throughout the years. The original part of the home, which includes the kitchen, is over a hundred years old. The kitchen wallpaper seemed drab, but this we could easily fix. We made an offer and within two months we were lake home owners.
It is amazing how different things look once you own them. What seemed drab when we were looking at the house, turned out to be ugly moldy kitchen wallpaper upon closer inspection. I was not too worried, I am not that crazy about kitchen wallpaper anyway, so I thought we would just remove it and paint. I was quite naïve at the time to the process of removing kitchen wallpaper that had been in place for several years. The first strip came off beautifully. We simply scored the paper, applied the glue dissolver and peeled the whole sheet off. This was a flux. The rest of the paper came off in pieces no larger than a postage stamp. By time we had removed the last of the kitchen wallpaper it was clear to us that we either were going to spend hours on scraping, dissolving glue and doing patch work to the walls. Either that or we were going to find new kitchen wallpaper that we liked.
As we began to look at kitchen wallpaper I saw several nice choices that I could live with. Some even had borders and mini blinds to match. My husband still was not convinced that he wanted to have a pattern that we would be looking at everyday. After searching through the vast amounts of kitchen wallpaper that is available we discovered a plain textured paper that you can paint. The actual kitchen wallpaper is a heavy white paper that comes in a variety of different textures. Once you hang it on the walls you can paint it any color that you want. We went with a texture that seemed fitting for the age of our home and then painted it a soft yellow to lighten the kitchen area. It was a great solution for us. We did not have the huge time factor of preparing the walls for paint and we did not have the patterns of traditional kitchen wallpaper. I now love my lake home kitchen again.