Wall papering Part I

Oh what fun it is to Wallpaper. I always wondered why wall paper went out of style in the 70’s in the U.S. and now I know. It is a true pain in the neck to put it up.
In my apartment I had very old, mismatched, slightly moldy wallpaper. The pink floral wallpaper that dominated my main room was peeling away from the wall as if in an effort to escape the orange checkered wall paper underneath. The orange checkered wall paper was disintegrating so that you could view the blue paisley paper under that. It was like a color changing gobstopper on my walls (lick at your own risk).
Ukrainians really like their wall paper. Since most buildings are made of concrete or something similar painting the walls does not really work. They are just too rough and uneven, so instead they wall paper. In Ukraine, wall paper is almost art. You go into the hardware stores and there are hundreds of types of wall paper. Almost all of it is textured now (to cover the roughness of the walls). Some have glitter, others have raised designs, and the children’s wallpaper has Winnie the Pooh on it. It ranges from 12 UAH ($2.50) a roll to over 70 UAH ($14.00) for the super nice Italian wallpaper. It also comes in every color, from plain white and silver to vibrant orange with huge mauve tropical flowers. Whatever suits your taste, although who’s tastes the latter matches is anyone’s guess.
My director decided that I needed new wallpaper; I did but didn’t really care enough about it to do anything. I was actually kind of interested to see how many layers would peel off before my end of service. I mean, how many layers could there be? Either way, a date was chosen and several teachers were going to come over and help me wallpaper. My job was to measure and buy new wall paper and get the old wall paper off before they got there. Okay, no problem, how hard could that be?
Problem one, I was told Friday night that I needed measurements for Saturday morning because one of the teachers would take me to the store to get the paper. I do not have a measuring tape, or even a ruler for that matter. I do however have string and a sheet of paper that I know measures 8.5 by 11 inches. The piece of string is close to three sheets of paper. The first measurement I took was exactly 3 pieces of string, so far so good. The second was 2 and maybe 3/4ths. Shoot, I have no way to measure small distances. No wait! I have some two by five inch index cards and if I fold the sheet of paper in half that is 5.5 inches or 4 inches soooo…do you see where I am going with this? You get creative when you are a Peace Corps volunteer. I measured around my house, 4 surprisingly odd shaped rooms and it took me over two hours of moving furniture, climbing on chairs folding and unfolding string, cards and sheets of paper and endless paper cuts. I already don’t like wall papering and I haven’t ever gotten to the paper part yet. Well, the wall paper part anyway. I won’t even tell you what a pain it was to convert all of those inch measurements into centimeters longhand. It hurt even more when I realized I had a converter on my phone that could have done it for me.
We go shopping for the paper the next day and I feel like I have fallen down the rabbit hole. There are aisles of the stuff. Silver, gold, shiny, matte, every shade of the rainbow, with rhinestones or little mirrors, animals or flowers, light or dark, like sandpaper or like leather. The “leather” wallpaper was nice enough you could upholster your car in it. It was unbelievable and I thought to myself, “how will I ever choose?”. And then I looked at the price tags and said, “oh, that’s how.” There were only 15 or so options but I still agonized over it for almost an hour. It’s worse then picking out a couch because bad wall paper will totally kill a room. Especially rooms like mine that have not furniture to offset the bad wallpaper. I chose white with gold flowers (it’s not as bad as it sounds but it is real shiny) for the main room, blue geometric pattern for the corridor, pink geometric for the kitchen ( I am in a pink phase, I have no idea why), and white geometric for the bathroom. No, it’s not riveting but it was cheap. Well, around 200 UAH. We had to give my measurements to the pimply faced guy in the wall paper department and he figured out how many roles I needed of each color. He SEEMED competent but more on that later. Then I get the pleasure of lugging 30 pounds of wall paper, glue, and brushes on Ukrainian public transportation for 45 minutes to get home.
Next, to get the old wall paper off of the walls. It’s already peeling off of the walls anyway so it should just pull right off. Right? Wrong. To be continued…