Your Wallpaper Victories and Horror Stories Please

In My Humble Opinion
1

We’re in the process of buying a new (to us) home and the former occupant was a little old lady who loved little old lady flowery wallpaper.

Mrs. BD of course hates every bit of it and to save money she (she actually means we and probably mostly me) plans to remove the wallpaper and paint the walls.
My on-line research seems to show that perforation, steaming and scraping are the leading methods. But I’d like to hear from the teeming masses on this one.

So please, any tips you could give me on getting that stuff off the walls is appreciated.

Also, if you have a celebrated victory or horror stories about your wallpapering projects I would love to hear them.

2

Any passing mods if you will please fix my speeling and correct Vicitories I would appreciate it.

3

What’s behind the wallpaper - sheetrock, plasterboard, lathe and plaster, etc. - makes a huge difference when tying to remove wallpaper. The original part of my house was built about 1960 and finished with rough plasterboard. It pretty much impossible to get old wallpaper off and leave a smooth finish. In areas where my wife wanted to use different wallpaper she had to go with a textured paper to hide the roughness of the board, in areas where she wanted paint I had to put up new 1/4" drywall over the old plasterboard. Another option would have been to skim coat the walls, but mudding is not my forte.

Do have fun, now!

4

No victory stories, only horror stories of scoring, steaming, chemicals, and every home remedy you can think of so that I could spend hours and hours picking off dime size pieces and still leaving the walls in horrible shape.

And that’s not even telling you about the rooms where the people put the wallpaper right on the drywall with no paint, primer, or anything underneath. Yes, they built the house, and then they put wallpaper right on the new drywall.

If my husband were in construction, the best thing would have been to actually take the drywall off and just put up new drywall and paint, but he isn’t, so we just lived with walls with gouges.

And I have never removed strippable wallpaper that stripped, even if I was the one who put it up and know the directions were followed.

I hope you have better luck.

5

Well, there was thisyellow wall paper I had a problem with that one time…

6

The previous owners of our house were big fans of wallpaper. So much so that they put 3-4 layers of it, at least, in every room but the kitchen.

The bedrooms had wallpaper borders all around the ceilings that we removed first, and as we started on the rest of it we realized it was several layers. At that point I made an executive decision and spent a night finding, spackling over, and smoothing down the seams, and once it dried we just painted over it. Looks fine. No regrets. Plus, at this point in the house’s age I fear the wallpaper layers may actually be crucial to the integrity of the walls ;).

7

In my room, the previous occupant (my sister) put up a border of wallpaper along the ceiling.
Trying to remove it was a massive pain in the butt. That whole “fabric softener and warm water” trick? Didn’t work. The gel remover you buy at the big box stores? Didn’t work. Ended up renting a wallpaper steamer and that was a pain. It took two days to remove a 12" border from my small room. When you see videos, they like to show the paper coming off in nice strips, cleanly removing the glue… It’s all a LIE.

If you have a lot of wallpaper to take down, hire a professional.

8

Every wallpapered room is different. My husband and I stripped an entire house of it eight years ago, and most of it went pretty easily. We sprayed on a wallpaper remover solution of some kind (using a hand-pump sprayer thing), let it sit, then scraped away. The biggest disaster was in the powder room, where the surface of the drywall beneath crumbled. Had to skim coat that room before we painted it.

In the past, I have had to pull wallpaper off entire rooms in one-inch-wide strips, because it wouldn’t come any other way.

9

Both Pepper Mill and I hate wallpaper – it’s one of the things I love about her.

Almost every room in our new house was wallpapered. There were two flocked ceilings, as well. We viewed it as a long-term project.

Best investment we made was for a wallpaper steamer. You’ve got a little container that you put water in and a plug that goes into the wall. After a while steam comes out through a long hose, at the end of which you typically have a rectangular tray-like thing. You put this against the wallpaper and saturate it with steam. It loosens the glue holding it on and saturates the paper, allowing you (in the best case scenario) to simply peel it off. If it’s stubborn, you can use a putty knife under a raised edge to try to loosen it. Try not to dig in and scratch the plaster or plasterboard.

Sometimes this doesn’t work, and more extreme measures are needed. We also used a “paper tiger” – a doorknob-like thing you hold in your hand with toothed rollers underneath that score the wallpaper. You then go over it with the steamer again, and hopefully the steam will bleed in through the rips you just made in the wallpaper. The teeth leave little divots in the plaster that you’ll have to fix later.

Occasionally you [I[still* need to take more drastic methods. We had a curved archway where we couldn’t use the flat steamer head. I disconnected the head and simply played the end of the hose over the paper.

Near the baseboards, the paper clung tenaciously. The guy we bought the house from was the primary owner, and he had put the paper up directly on the unpainted walls. And, it turns out, over the varnish that had slopped over onto the plaster. The wallpaper was essentially glued on by varnish as well as wallpaper paste.

There are also wallpaper paste solvents you can use to get you through tough spots.

The wallpaper in the bathroom came down pretty easily. well, most of it did. Pepper Mill got laid off from her job one day, came home in a bad mod, looked at the horrible pink wallpaper in the bathroom and tore it down with her bare hands. A lot of plaster came with it.

The flocking on the ceiling was treated in much the same way, except it couldn’t come off in sheets – it came down in wads. Pepper Mill was taking some of it down (this was on a different day, so she wasn’t using anger to get it down) and saw that our cat Midnight had wandered in, and was covered in the stuff. She didn’t want the cat to be licking it off, so she got into the shower, washed herself off, got a big handful of soap, grabbed Midnight, and pulled her in, soaping her up and rinsing her off and throwing her out into the hallway before she knew what hit her. To re-iterate:

a.) Yes, Pepper Mill was naked in the shower
b.) Midnight hated to get wet
c.) We don’t de-claw our cats.

She’s a tough one, that Pepper Mill.

To get the wallpaper in the stairwell I had to rig up a platform with boards and a ladder to reach the ceiling.
After the wallpaper was all coerced of the walls, I went though and made repairs – replacing the stuff lost in the bathroom, spackling up the cracks, dabbing spackle into the divots left by the Paper Tiger, then sanding it all flat again.
It was worth it., The flocking was discolored (especially over the stove, where it held thirty years of grease), the flocked ceiling in the bathroom hid a bad ceiling repair that I had to fix. The wallpaper in the bathroom, kitchen, and hall were ugly. Some of the wallpaper in the living room didn’t really match the rest of it, and they were clearly hoping people wouldn’t notice.

The painted walls look much better.

10

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Maybe I’ll get lucky and the loan will fall through.

But seriously. I’ve read that you can make your own stripping solution from equal parts water and vinegar. Anybody try that?

11

CalMeacham - What kind of steamer did you buy?

There seems to be two price points for these things.

The DIY Home Depot stuff - I think there’s a Wagner model for $50-$100 and then there’s the pro tools which look to be $800 to $1000. I was hoping got get away with the cheaper model but would buck up if I knew that the pricey ones were significantly better.

12

We definitely went with a cheap unit, about $100. Definitely not a $1000 device.

I borrowed someone else’s at first, but it quickly became clear that we needed our own, full-time. A good thing we bought it, too. The steamer head got kinda filthy with bits of wallpaper and old paste.

13

Some years ago, I helped a friend prepare a room to be a nursery. Like you, his goal was to remove the wallpaper to then paint.

We were using some stuff from Home Depot that you sponged on, and then scraped the paper off. The stuff would be absorbed into the paper and loosen the glue. It worked reasonably well. BUT it’s not until we started that we found there were multiple…like 5…layers of wallpaper before reaching the wall. (While mindlessly scrubbing I was actually thinking of calculating the volume/space loss of the room due to the thickness of the accumulated layers :wink:
So whereas this stuff worked on the “surface” layer, it would only work to varying degrees on the lower layers. And you end up with…a mess - different levels of progress on different parts of the walls. The only good thing is that once you finally get to the actual wall (on the first section), you now have a means to accurately gauge your progress !

The point is: don’t go in planning to remove a “single” layer.

14

I’ve had eventual victory over a townhouse full of wallpaper.

  1. I agree that every wallpapered room is different. My place had three different kinds of wallpaper that called for two different tactics.
    One was pink, textured wallpaper. This type pulled apart into two layers without any chemicals. After pulling the top layer off, the bottom layer was a porous paper. The bottom layer could be removed by “painting” it with liquid Dif using a paint roller, then pulling it off while damp.
    Another was a thinner wallpaper. Perforating this and then spraying it with a lot of Gel Dif was the best approach here.

  2. The steamer didn’t work any better than the Dif for me, and since it’s more of a hassle to set up and use I only tried it once. However, perhaps there is a type of wallpaper that it works a lot better on.

  3. If you are very gentle with the perforating tool (“paper tiger”), it might not leave marks on the wall. I wasn’t gentle enough everywhere, and it may be impossible to do this perfectly. You should plan on needing three coats and some spackling anyway, as it’s nearly impossible to leave the drywall in perfect condition afterward.

  4. Allocate a lot of time. It’s slow going and when I tried to rush, the paper would rip or layers would separate, making it take even longer. Or I would damage the drywall, requiring extra spackling and making the final result look worse. It took me about a year of working weekends on and off to remove wallpaper from about 800 sq. ft. across 3 rooms. And this was before I had children.

Afterward, my wife and I agreed we would never again buy a house with wallpaper.

15

Worst stuff I’ve ever had to tackle is painted woodchip wallpaper on a ceiling. Absolutely vile. No amount of steam, piercing with spiked rollers, or soaking in removal fluid (even a specialised enzyme-based one called Zinsser DIF which essentially breaks down the underlying paste) so much as dented it. Ended up boarding over the whole ceiling, losing about 25mm of height. Luckily it was a pretty tall ceiling to begin with so not a big tragedy.

Upside; the tools and techniques we bought and learned came in handy when it came to the walls in the same room (luckily covered in “normal” wallpaper), which we absolutely spanked. The Zinsser DIF was especially effective. We spiked the paper, applied the fluid, and the next morning it was essentially falling off. Bliss.

16

Dude, do you want to get the wallpaper off or not?

17

I tore out wallpaper in my kitchen & dining room and in one bathroom. They must have done the bathroom first because they’d put up backing paper in the kitchen and it all came down nicely. I did not have an actual wallpaper steamer, but I had this little Scünci steamer (that I’d ordered from an infomercial when I waked and baked once; do not recommend) and that did okay, but the water capacity was small and I’d have to refill the thing and wait for it to heat back up so it was a pain in the ass and I should have just invested in a proper wallpaper steamer.

And either I couldn’t figure out how to use it or Dif just didn’t work at all for me. Same with the paper tiger thingy. Upon preview, I’m reading the post above this one and they let the Dif soak in overnight. Huh. Never thought of that. :: face palm ::

Now, in the bathroom, they put the wallpaper straight on and it wasn’t that old and a scraper + Scünci steamer were employed. This resulted in huge chunks of wallboard being pulled off with the old wallpaper and that’s how I learned to “skim mud” or whatever with the joint compound.

Anyway, friends don’t let friends put up wallpaper.

18

This is the wrong approach. Just buy paneling and put on the walls over the wallpaper.

Otherwise just paint the wallpaper as is.

The worst approach is to try to strip wallpaper.

19

Totally disagree. Patterned wallpaper is a bitch to cover. And things start looking downright awful if the wallpaper starts to blister or peel.

Better to have a clean surface to start with – get rid of the old wallpaper. It’s worth the effort.

20

When we bought the house we currently live in, it was covered - every room - in wallpaper. (Also frilly floor length curtains, but that’s another story.) We’ve removed the wallpaper in about half the house by now (about 12 years later). We’ve had the same mixed results as everybody else here - success depends on the wall, the wall preparation, the paper type and lots of other things. I’ll just tell you our worst.

We happened to be remodelling our master bathroom at the time, which grew as projects do to include the bedroom. We had a design-build firm doing that work and for reasons I forget now we decided to remove the wallpaper from the guest bathroom. Nothing worked, not the solvents or the steamer or the perferations. Everything combined and the best we could do was pick off dime-sized pieces with a large chunk of drywall, so it was a total failure. We finally called the sheetrock contractor over from the other room and said “yeah, I know it’s a change order and will cost us extra, but… take this room down to studs and re-drywall it, too.”