Family stuck in war with wallpaper

Our house looks like a battle zone these days.

Don't blame us. It's our wallpaper that's the problem.

Joni and I spent much of last weekend attacking our dining room and kitchen walls to remove old wallpaper.

Becca and Bailey helped some. So did our 12-year-old goddaughter, who begged to help us scrape off wallpaper. She said it was fun to tear it off. We wanted it off, too, but we wouldn't describe it as anything remotely like fun.

The wallpaper may be decades old, but its installers put it up seemingly with enough glue to supply most Third World countries.

We borrowed a steam machine to aid our mission. It helped, but it also turned the glue into an oozing white paste that still required hard scraping to get off the walls.

All this just so we can paint the walls and beautify our home. We didn't know it would take forever to rip off the wallpaper.

But we should have realized it wasn't that easy. Not even the experts on all those home-makeover television shows go up against wallpaper. They just paint over it or cover it with new drywall. Now we know why.

In our assault on the stubborn wallpaper, I wondered at times if we should just throw a few grenades in its direction. But even such an explosive assault probably would have had little impact on our wallpaper.

This stuff lasts longer than an Egyptian mummy.

Wallpaper actually traces its roots back to China. The Chinese, after all, invented paper, and they glued rice paper onto their walls as early as 200 B.C., according to one wallpaper installer's Web site.

It's probably why the Chinese also invented gunpowder. They needed something to remove all that wallpaper when they wanted to remodel.

The Europeans began using wallpaper in the 1400s, and a guild of paperhangers was first established in France in 1599.

Wallpaper came to America in 1739 when Plunket Fleeson began turning out the stuff in Philadelphia, sparking home-improvement revolutionaries.

Not to be outdone, King Louis XVI issued a decree in 1778 that required a roll of wallpaper be 34 feet in length. There's no mention of any paste requirement.

In the Victorian era, machine-made wallpaper put the stuff within the budget of almost every homeowner.

But it was in the roaring 1920s that wallpaper really took off. According to one wallpaper installer, it was known as the Golden Age of Wallpaper. And here I thought it was all those speakeasies that had people feeling so fine.

Of course, a little intoxication probably helped sell some of the 400 million rolls of wallpaper that were bought in that decade.

After World War II, wallpaper got a boost from plastic resins that offered stain resistance, durability and strength. So that's why we're having to labor to remove the stuff.

Getting the wallpaper off the walls is only half the battle. You also have to get the sticky stuff off your fingers, hair and clothes.

Our kitchen floor was littered with little pieces of wallpaper, making our house seem more like a giant home for a hamster than one for human beings.

There's still some wallpaper stubbornly clinging to the walls. But it can't last forever. Or can it?

Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.