On Thu 25 Sep 2008 10:14:18p, Big_Jake told us...

On Sep 25, 5:53*pm, "h" wrote:
"K. G. Ulicni" wrote in
messagenews:ldqnd497jtj5lg2
...

I have a house built in the early 1920's. Every wall in every room was
wallpapered with the paper applied over the bare plaster, multiple
layers no less. No paint, no primer just plaster. It was a major pain
to get all the paper off those walls, lots of scrapes and gouges left
behind to patch when done. Was this a common practice back then?

Yes, of course, but all you have to do is spray the paper with water,
wai
t
1-2 minutes, then scrape it off with no gouging. Why is this so
difficult
for people to do? My house is nearly 200 years old and it only takes
(too
k)
about 8 hours to scrape each room down to the bare plaster. And that was
only because the previous owners (morons) allowed multiple layers of
pape
r
to build up. We stripped off all the old and put up new wallpaper in
each
room. And no, we didn't treat the walls. We used the strippable stuff,
so
the few rooms we've wanted to re-decorate since then had the wallpaper
removed in about 20 minutes.

You got lucky.

The typical old house wallpaper that I see in my 90 year old houses is
a layer of 25 year old vinyl wallpaper, with a coat or two of paint
over it, and 2-3 layers of older wall paper underneath. I have tried
DIF, the Paper Tiger, special stripping tools, and even a steamer.
Still takes hours and hours, and you have to get ALL of the old paste
off before paint will stick.

JK


Personally, I prefer wallpaper, and most homes I've owned have had
wallpaper in every room. However, given the situation you found yourself
in, I would certainly remove everything down to the plaster, then seal and
size the plaster, install lining paper, size the lining paper, then install
the final paper. This would not only give me the result I prefer, but also
make it infinitely easier to repaper when desired.

--
Wayne Boatwright

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