LESLIE: Louise in Texas is on the line and needs some help cleaning up after a gardening project gone awry. Tell us what happened.
LOUISE: Oh, yes. We have these insidious vines. One found its way in a crack – I guess my windows weren’t very good – and it grew into a back bedroom that I had closed off this winter. And it grew across my wall and onto the ceiling. So I pulled it down and cut it off and I went outside and now it has left behind hard stuff on there that I can’t get off. I don’t know how to get it off without damaging the wall.
TOM: Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about and whenever you have a vine attached to a house, those attachment points are really insidious. They’re very hard to get off and it really takes nothing more than elbow grease.
And so, if you’re talking about a drywall surface here, you’re literally going to have to sand that surface, lightly abrade that surface, because you don’t want to cut through the paper to get off anything that the vine left behind.
Then once you’re done sanding it, then you have to prime and paint the drywall. And you need to use a good-quality primer here and prime the entire surface, if not the entire room, and then repaint the room. But there’s no way to clean what’s left behind with that vine debris. You have to actually physically abrade it off. Scrape it, prime it, sand it to get rid of it.
And if you want to slow down those vines from growing on the outside of your house, think about spraying Roundup on them. Roundup, you spray it on the leaves and it goes down through the plant’s infrastructure and kills them at the roots. And that might help get it under control.
Using Roundup Weed killer is dangerous and can cause cancer, there are many lawsuits against the makers of Roundup.