Removing wallpaper without wanting to off yourself??

In My Humble Opinion
21

Ahh I just adore this place. Thank you all SO much for responding!

Gracious. I am thoroughly horrified! Eeeek…I don’t know. I have to say, the price of having it taken down professionally might not be so bad after all!! My house was built in 1919 and I’m quite sure we have lead paint. Plus we have 3 floors of this stuff to rip off! I’ve been a little worried about the lead since I have chronic Lyme disease and don’t want anything compromising my immune system even more…Oh dear. Well, I guess I will have to so some serious pondering about this. Right now I’m leaning towards calling someone to do the job!

And drat…I don’t know any preschoolers!!

22

Oh yeah thats a good idea let preschoolers scrape of lead paint. :slight_smile:

23

That’s the method my wife and I used in three rooms.

The DIF didn’t work too well, even with repeated soakings. The paper always separated and left a backing layer. Fortunately, the layer underneath was porous stuff and the DIF soaked in and dissolved it easily.

Each room took six to eight hours. I can only imagine how much worse it would be with multiple layers of paper and plaster walls.

BTW, I mentioned to a neighbor that I should have just bought or rented a steamer, and he told me they don’t work much better than DIF and scraping.

Good luck.

24

Hot vinegar works well too, especially at removing the old glue. Heat in the microwave, sponge on, let sit a while and try removing the wallpaper.

25

The biggest problem we had with the paper tiger was tracks all over the walls. Filling and sanding afterwards was horrible.

I will never ever wallpaper any room in my house ever!

26

Get the steamer. Our house was coated with wallpaper (which Pepper Mill and I both hated), and we stripped practically every room. I borrowed a steamer for awhile, but finally broke down and bought one. It’s great – lets you steam an area of about a square foot, then it scrapes right off. Pepper liked the solution peeling better and the Paper Tiger, but I didn’t. And the damned Paper Tiger would sometimes leaves a lot of little divots in the wall that had to be spackled over.

Get the steamer. In fact, I’ll sell you mine.

27

Yeah, any way you do it, you’re going to end up with wall repair to do.

Just painting over the now bare walls isn’t good enough. They either need to floated out to get them smooth and all the same level, or you need to texture them.

The only exception I can think of is if you’re going for a distressed look.

If you are going for smooth walls, after skim coating and sanding, you’ll need to prime the walls with a drywal sealer. For best results, anyways.

28

'Tis why I was hinting that anyone doing this would very likely have an array of taping knives at their disposal. Along with a 5-gallon bucket of mud, of course. Par for the course with an older home – some of my walls must have a quarter inch of mud on them, hiding forty years of defects.

29

Ahhh, wallpaper hell. I’m there. Slowly climbing out, but I feel your pain. Our house has TEXTURED walls with layers of old wallpaper.

Don’t use the roller/hole puncher. You will not be able to rip the paper off in long sheets (which makes you feel a small victory every time.) And you may damage the wall underneath.

Tear off the main paper and leave the backing. If you are lucky enough to have smooth walls underneath, this will be quite easy.

Get a nice spray bottle and fill with warm water. Spray the backing paper in sheet sections and wait a moment. YOu will notice (hopefully) that the backer paper will begin to bubble or pucker. Now grab your putty knife–no need for the razor–and sweep the backer paper off. Dif did nothing for me. Fabric Softner and vinegar do work for the trouble spots. When the wall is still wet, give it a good wipe with old towels to pull the glue off. With the putty knife you will actually squeegie off most of the glue. You can also buy a small squeegie and really get those walls clean.

You can do an average room in a day.

Horror story ahead: In our front living room, the wallpaper was a a type of 70’s straw/textured pattern which was literally glued to the wall. We tried to rip off the straw-crap and slowly scrub the glue-cement crap out of the texture. After a year, we ended up skim coating the wall smooth. Ourselves. I have much respect for drywallers/finishers.

Don’t forget cold beer, talk radio and don’t let the wet paper dry on your floor or carpet…you will be sticking to the floor for ages.

30

I have had success with the hot water and fabric softener mixture as well. I have scraped wallpaper off many times and am preparing to do it again.

I like using fabric softener instead of chemicals because there are no fumes and I’m not afraid of getting it all over my skin.

Spray it down in sections and let it set for a while, then spray it again. Often you will pull off a big section but be left with the glue or the bottom layer of the paper. Spray the leftovers again and scrape off with a putty knife.

Sometimes I score the paper first, sometimes not. It depends on how stubborn the paper is. Once in a while you get lucky and it comes off easily. This usually happens on the first piece you try, which tricks you into thinking ‘this will be easy! Look how easy this piece came off!’ Then after that section the paper will be stuck on there like it was put on with superglue, forcing you to pick off tiny pieces the size of your thumbnail.

Get a friend to help you and see who can clear a wall first. Convince them it is an exciting game! Offer money and prizes!

31

I had a pre-1920’s house that was papered. I didn’t have plaster beneath the paper, I had concrete. If the walls were originally papered, then you might have lathe, portland cemet and then paper on that. If there’s plaster, it’ll be a finish layer on top of the portland.

If you can peel a corner up, you can tell by the color, the portland is sidewalk gray and looks very much like cememt.

Our wallpaper was literally paper, not vinyl on paper. I rented a steam machine from the rental store, got a wide bladed scraper from the hardware store and just kept steaming and peeling. The portland is nearly impervious to the water so it does very little damage to the wall. (Careful, the scraper gets sharp from being “honed” on the rough wall).

Unfortunately, when the walls were clean & dry (let’m dry for a long time) the bare walls look like a sidewalk. Painting them would’ve just looked like a painted sidewalk, not smooth.

This left me with a couple of choices, paint them and call it “textured” (not very decorous, tho), hang more paper, or plaster them.

Plastering is nearly a lost art, I couldn’t afford to get it done & I couldn’t do it.

We hung more paper. I probably could’ve hung the paper on top of the other & saved the scraping process. But - since I did scrape - I had to hang the paper on the portland.

The wall-paper store said we had to seal the portland with an acrylic sealer so we did. We then hung the paper and it was still sufficiently porous that it sucked the moisture out of the glue. The paper shrank (yes, we “booked” it first) and the edges pulled apart leaving us with 1/8th-inch gaps between every sheet.

When we did the next room over, I sealed the portland under two coats of latex paint, then papered. It worked much better.

Maybe two or three coats of sealer would’ve helped the first room. One certainly wasn’t enough.

One option for covering portland walls, by my recollection, is to cover them with wallboard. The wallboard makers make a 1/4th-inch stuff that’s good for this. It’s made for remodeling and will conceal the cracks & stuff that occur in old houses’ walls from settling. You can paint it afterward & it looks like regular plaster or wallboard walls.

If you want to do this (paint the walls), then you might just take a sledge to the wall & break the plaster down and hang standard 5/8th’s wallboard in its place. Mud, sand & paint and you’ve got new walls.

I’ll bet a house as old as yours has no insulation in the walls and if you expose the wall studs, you can insert insulation in there.

HTH - B

32

Well, in defense of the Paper Tiger, it does work well in many situations. The scoring allows the solvent to get behind the paper instead of just sitting there on top of it where it might or might not soak in. Especially useful for vinyls. And yes, it does let you pull up long sheets. Sometimes. It doesn’t work perfectly all the time. No method does.

(btw…The holes are filled in when you do your skim coat of mud. Which you will have to do regardless of the method used for stripping.)

Sometimes, though, the paper is just a bitch. I feel for you. But, that explains why we charge so much for doing that work. It’s often times hard. It both sucks and blows.

Bottom line: pick a method you think you want to use. Then try it. If it doesn’t work on your walls, try another method.

I find country music helps out during the easier jobs. Nirvana and Foo Fighters for the painintheass jobs.

33

Oh, and about the lead paint, we just painted over it. Stripping is difficult and dangerous. You do have to get a chemical pre-treater for the old paint since latex paint won’t stick well to lead paint.

Consult your local paint store.

-B

34

I’m shocked and appalled that any self-respecting do-it-yourselfer you pay someone to remove their wallpaper. How can you truly appreciate the end result when you don’t fully understand the toil that went into it?

I actually don’t mind scraping wallpaper, and am curious as to what the going rate is for this sort of work. Is it by the job or by the hour? Does anyone in the SF Bay Area need wallpaper removed? I have my own spraybottle and scraper!

35

well, when faced with 6 layers of wallpaper from the late 1800’s to the 30’s and lead paint this do-it-yourselfer paid the pro. the pro charged by the job and came in and started at 9am and left with the scrappings at 4pm that day. we had the living room, dining room, stair, upstairs hall, and library scrapped.

shana, if your paper reaches as far back at '19 you may have a bit more trouble. the glues they used way back then are very, very, fierce. try prying a corner to see how many layers and how old they are before you decide anything

unless there was extensive reno in that house you will be dealing with plaster and lath. the best part of old plaster walls that are scraped is the lovely finish coat, it is sooooo very smooth, and cool and soft to the touch. i felt kinda bad painting them after. there were rather large bits of damage and a plasterer is way more expensive than a wall scrapper.

36

Again…thank you all…you guys rock.

Um, but I think I’m getting a nervous tick now… I think I would rather blow the darn house up than attempt any of the methods I’ve been reading!! Gosh I’m a wimp, but I really am scared now! I quite liked the fabric softner and hot vinegar method - only because it sounds less toxic than some of the other products I’ve seen - but I know for a fact that all the paper we have is vinyl. I wonder if that method would work on vinyl? Am I to understand that only Dif or steaming works on vinyl paper?

37

Vinyl is not paper - that is the problem with removing vinyl - it is not porous - the steam/soak techniques (with prior scoring) work by getting under the wall covering and dissolving the adhesive.

I’ve never encountered vinyl, so let’s start over with the specification that you are facing a wall of non-porous plastic.

(my guess - score the hell out of it to make it porous, then use live steam (nasty, but efficient) or use some god-awful solvent)

dopers who have removed vinyl want to jump in?

p.s. - if you are good, use a retractable-blade utility knife to score the stuff - have just the point extended, and angle the blade so it’s almost on its side - adjust the angle so the blade penetrates the covering without scratching the plaster.

How do you know that there is only vinyl? If there is nothing under it, you lucked out - somebody went to the trouble of stripping wallPAPER to put up vinyl - and in doing so removed the lead paint (maybe - was there a period when both vinyl wallcovering AND lead paint were available? Dopers?)

p.p.s - my house was also built in 1919 - beware the ceilings - the custom was to paper them as well - BUT - if it ain’t busted…
I just painted over the solid, steadfast paper - 20 years later, it still looks good

38

Vinyls? - see my previous posts.

39

Some vinyl is strippable, I think you can just grab a corner and peel. Some come off clean (still have to wash away the old glue) and some leave a paper backing that can be soaked/steamed off.

Check out this link. There’s some info & helpful pictures.

40

Why Shirley gets the hives when she sees wallpaper
My mother-in-law is a habitual wallpaperer. These people need to be restrainted at all costs!

I’ve known her 15 years and she has changed every room ( except two) about every 18 months. ( the wall paper and border rarely match. she only buys the stuff on sale…and geee, it doesn’t coordinate…what a surprise.)

Anywhooo, she’s done this for 30 years.

When she dies, I am not removing any of that paper. No way in hell.

I’m selling the house ( ok, hubby will sell the house) as is.

Can you paint over the paper at all or are the seems coming up?