The first step of wallpaper removal: NEVER put it up to begin with. Please. If you are ever thinking of moving out of your house, don’t hang wallpaper. You might think that there is no way someone won’t love your paper, but trust me it is a guarantee that someone will hate it.

And if you can’t follow that advice. Please, for the love of all things holy, don’t paper every single room. Confine yourself to one or two rooms.

Because one day you will sell your house. And the new owner will be faced with room after room like this:

And they will wonder how you could have ever thought that was worthy of hanging on the wall. Does this wallpaper make you weep like it does me?

Then when they are removing it and it has adhered to the plaster and tears the plaster off the wall in chunks, they will curse you slightly.

Hopefully whatever wallpaper you are trying to remove has been hung properly.

There are many different ways to remove wallpaper. Some people use a steamer, a method I personally don’t reccommend. Unless you like to be aggravated and burn yourself periodically.

Step One: Acquire your tools

You will need:

A scraper, I prefer to use a five-in-one tool above all over scrapers. (That link will being you to a site that sells them 5 for under $30. You can buy them and invite your friends over to help!)

A product such as DIF wall paper remover

Paper tiger, or something similar to score the wallpaper. If you are doing a small area using the pointy side of your 5-in-1 tool to CAREFULLY score the paper will work fine. But for larger areas you are much better off using a tool designed for the purpose.
A large sponge

Step Two:
Using your paper tiger score your wallpaper. Score it as much as possible. It makes the next steps easier.

Step Three:
Apply the wall paper remover using a roller and apply like you would wall paint. Allow it to sit until it has soaked under the wallpaper. Work in smallish areas because you do not want the remover to dry on the walls.

Step Four:
Pray that the person who installed the wallpaper used sizing so that the wallpaper comes off quickly and easily.

Step Five:
If you are like 95% of the homeowners removing wallpaper you will discover that they person who installed the wallpaper decided to skip the step of applying the sizing to the walls.

Step Six:

Using your 5-in-1 tool gently scrape the wallpaper off the wall. You might need to reapply your wallpaper removing product.

Step Seven:

Continue around the room until all the paper has been removed. At this point you might notice that there are bits of wallpaper glue still stuck to the wall. Using your sponge and a bucket of hot water, sponge down the walls to remove the residue.

Step 8:

Allow the walls to dry for a few days before you do anything else. Now you can decide if you want to wallpaper again or paint.

After all this, I am guessing you choose paint.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 8:08 am and is filed under DIY, How to Guide. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.