On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 17:39:57 +0100, "Tim Downie"
wrote:

Many moons ago, we redecorated our younger daughter's room by peeling off
the exisiting vinyl wallpaper and simply painting over the remaining layer
of paper.

Fast-forward a good few years and we're trying to remove that thin layer of
painter paper. No amount of perforating, soaking, steaming or blow-torching
(you can tell I'm getting a little desperate) will enable us to scrape off
this wretched stuff at a rate faster that 1 square foot every 20 minutes to
half an hour!

I don't know whether it's simply the effect of the paint making the paper
waterproof of some strange paste used many years ago before we bought the
house.

Any suggestions?

Tim

Hi,

Maybe it's some sort of lining paper stuck with strong glue. Try
scoring the paper through to the plaster, spray with water with
detergent in, and wait for the water to soak behind the paper. Then
give it some welly with the steamer and scrape off in strips using the
scores made in the paper earlier. Don't leave the steamer on too long
or it may 'blow' the plaster off the wall, let the plaster cool down
and come back to it if need be.

The best thing I've used for scraping is a 'hand hoe' which has a 2ft
handle and a rectangular blade at 80° to the handle. They can be
bought cheaply from pound shops etc, make sure the blade is sharpened
so it's really sharp. Then use both hands and scrape the paper off in
strips using part of the blade.

cheers,
Pete.