If Friday night is for the girlfriends, and Saturday night is for the wives...
Then clearly, Sunday is for scraping wallpaper.
Fortunately for me, I get to spend ALL THREE days scraping wallpaper. Somebody pinch me.
From the archives:
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| This animated .gif allows me to compress 5+ hours of pure misery into about 5 seconds, so I can enjoy over, and over, and over |
Yes, loyal reader, that took me about
5.5 hours to remove about 5 square feet of wallpaper. In looking at that .gif, the first slide looks more than 5 sf.... Let's say, for the sake of round numbers, that the number is 11 sf. Doing the math, we can estimate that I have a wallpaper removal rate of (11 sf / 5.5 hours ) =
2 sf/hr.
Now, my conscience tells me that the 2 sf/hr might be a little low because that particular wall in my bedroom was pretty stubborn. However, that wallpaper in the bedroom was all
very reachable with a ladder from a solid surface. This weekend, I had to plank between two ladders over my stairs and scrape wallpaper off the ceiling on a springy 2x10. Trust me when I say: 2 sf/hr is starting to sound like a pretty fast pace.
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| Walking the plank matey (above stairwell) |
When I bought this house, my one
major reservation was the amount of wallpaper. It honestly was a serious consideration because I know how horrible removing wall paper can be. Even with that moment of pause, I still underestimated the true horror of wallpaper.
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| This is what success looks like |
Let's take a moment to do a quick-n-dirty analysis on the time component of removing the wallpaper in this house:
Assumptions:
1) I'll use my recent appraisal of this house as my layout drawing (it's
loaded with even numbers).
2) Let's ignore all interior walls for now; instead, we will only focus on wallpaper on the party walls, exterior walls, and the ceilings. I've taken down (re: demolished) some walls and ceilings, which has allowed me to forgo wallpaper scraping... even though I think that this assumption is generous (since interior wall have wallpaper on
both sides), let's leave this as assumption #2.
3) Wallpaper removal rate is 2.0 sf/hour as calculated above. Obviously, this number is a scalar and could be used as a sliding parameter in the final calculation.
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| Appraisal sketch |
Downstairs:
Height = 9.5 ft
SF = (46*16 - 4*16) = 42(16) = 672 sf
Perimeter = 46*2 + 16*2 = 62(2) = 124 ft
---
Ceiling SF = 672 sf
Wall SF = (9.5 ft)*(124 ft) = 1178 sf
---
Total Downstairs = 1850 sf
Upstairs:
Height = 9 ft
SF = 672 + 7*8 = 728 sf
Perimeter = 124 + 7*2 = 138 ft
---
Ceiling SF = 728 sf
Wall SF = (9 ft)*(138 ft) = 1242 sf
---
Total Upstairs = 1970 sf
Total SF of Wallpaper = Total Upstairs + Total Downstairs
= 1850 + 1970 = 3,820 sf
Hours to scrape walls = (3,820 sf)(2 sf/hr) = 1,920 hours
OK, so I'm not feeling so bad about this. Wait---how many work hours are there in a year again?
Man hours in year = (40 hrs/week)(52 weeks) = 2,080 hours
Work in a couple weeks of paid vacation and/or holidays, and you're certainly there.
Conclusion:
There is enough wallpaper in this house to keep one full time person employed for over a year.
I'm not making these numbers up.
Should I double check that rate again?
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| This weekend, I scraped the area starting at the top of the stairs |
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| Then draw a level line from about 4ft above the upstairs floor all the way across. Everything above that imaginary line, and the ceiling above the stairwell. |
Going back to the sketch, it looks like this week I pulled down:
= (12 ft)(4 ft) + (2 ft)(6 ft) + (3 ft)(12 ft)
= 96 sf
of wallpaper.
Hours of project time:
Fri = 8
Sat = 6
Sun = 5
Future = 5 (I'm certainly not done this area yet)
Tot = 24 hours
Thus, this weekend, I accomplished the following rate:
(96 sf)/(24 hours) = 4.0 sf/hr
Which is
double the guestimated rate from the animated gif.
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| Weekend results. (I just realized that the light fixture in the hall isn't even closed to being centered+ |
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| Looking up to the high point of the ceiling above the stairs. This is the end result of spending a weekend scraping wallpaper. Sad, right? |
So, what have we learned? The rate of scraping wallpaper on the occupy site is somewhere between 2 and 4 sf/hr. Meaning that it would take a full time person somewhere between a half a year and a full year to complete the job.
Using a blended rate of about 3.0 sf/hr and adding in all the interior walls.. we're looking at the better part of a full year (if I didn't have a day job)
If that's not enough to put me on Prozac, let's get real:
If I can squeeze two (2) eight hour days in on every weekend, and use the superstar rate of 4 sf/hr, we get the following
(16 hrs/week)(4 sf/hr) = 64 sf/week rate of removal
(3,820 total sf of wallpaper)/(64 sf/week) = 59.7 weeks
to remove all wallpaper from house, which boils down to
1.15 years if I can manage to work every weekend.
Well, that mathematical analysis really cheered me up. Please check the math as I was just doing the calculations in my head as I typed. For a back of the envelope analysis, I think I'm pretty close.
Bottom line:
1) I'm a terrible wallpaper scraper; I need to increase my removal rate.
2) It is definitely cheaper to just knockdown every wall and ceiling, if time has any monetary value at all.
