Death of a Mural

"Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them." --William Wordsworth

Word, Mr. Wordsworth.  In the case of our kitchen mural, you are on point!

If you thought the random kitchen wall that we tore down was ... well, random ... then take a look at this mural that once graced the opposite kitchen wall!

Yes, it's wallpaper.  Yes, it's a formal garden on wallpaper.  Yes, it's a formal garden on wallpaper glued to my kitchen.

And Yes, it had to come down.

We took a random trip to Goodwill one evening and were looking for furniture to refurbish or shelving to use for one of the closets.  What my husband found instead was a 1989 Black & Decker wallpaper steamer for $10!  At first, I was irritated, thinking that there was no way this thing actually worked.  I had steamed wallpaper before at my parents' house, and it had been a total disaster.

But lo and behold, what you see here is definitely NOT a disaster!

It took less than 3 hours for him to steam and wipe down the entire wall.  There was very little damage to the drywall, which we'll have someone fix along with the drywall where that other wall came down.  I got all of the sticky paper swept up, and I even managed to find the wrinkled up piece that had the creepy lady sitting on a park bench behind the garden:

By the end of the night, that ridiculous mural was gone!  I pinned the creepy lady to our family corkboard, and then I stuck that wallpaper steamer on a shelf next to the four spindles down in that same unnecessary basement storage room for safe keeping.  You just never know when you'll need to completely reverse someone's decision to use wallpaper!  (I have a feeling that that storage room is going to get more and more necessary as we go...)

Ta-Da!  A perfectly informal, garden-less wall ... that I now have no clue what to do with. :-/  (Did someone say 'Pinterest'??)

There was another perk to our evening too, and that was the awesome find we made at Menards earlier that day.  Four reasonably-priced, perfectly-sized stools for our super-long counter.  They were added just in time to entertain for my husband's birthday a couple of days later!  They don't go with the floor or the cabinets, but there's a good reason for that.  That oak-colored laminate is not long for my kitchen ... just as soon as we can save up the money to replace it with something darker, richer and [preferably] real wood.

Coming up next ................... I gamble the cabinets in our Guest Bathroom as an experiment to see if they can be sanded and stained darker without looking like junk.  If I'm successful, the Kitchen Cabinet Makeover will begin shortly after the holidays!  If I'm not successful, I will slip into a deep, dark depression until we figure out an alternative for getting the cabinet color I want in the kitchen!  Wish me luck!