Gwen Morse wrote:
I had ugly wallpaper in my eat-in-kitchen. I tore it down. It wasn't
the normal "strip-able" wallpaper, and I only found that out when it
was too late.

I don't really want to cover the resulting wall with wallpaper,
although I will do that if it's absolutely necessary. I really prefer
to just fix up and paint the wall.
What are some options that just require elbow grease and tiny
financial outlays (like, less than $100)? I haven't tried steaming it
yet, but, I don't know that a steamer will work where the score/Diff
process failed.

You can paint right over wallpaper. My wife and I have now done it in
several rooms in our house.

My house is a 1923 colonial that obviously had wallpaper applied to
most of its rooms in, probably, 1923. Literally every room in the
house except the dining room was wallpapered when we got it. We pulled
up a couple corners of it when we looked at the house the first couple
times and figured it wouldn't be too difficult to get it off. Boy were
we wrong. We also tried DIF and ended up just doing a whole bunch of
damage to our walls after finding out it was just layer upon layer upon
layer of paper and trying to get it all off. It was like going back
through a time machine seeing all these different wallpapers. It took
me the better part of a week to get one 2x2 square foot section of our
kitchen done, and by the time I got down to bare plaster, my wall had a
noticeable dip in it from my scraping and sanding, and it was no longer
smooth.

Eventually we said "screw it" and decided to just paint over it. As
we've gone along we've sort of perfected the process. The first room
we did (that kitchen) didn't turn out all that great but it's still
better than looking at either wallpaper or damaged walls. There is
some bubbling of the paper, though, and some seams.

But the room I'm doing now - the living room - is turning out great.
This room has a wallpaper runner along the top, which means big seams
if I didn't do anything about it. The secret is to sand, sand, sand,
then prime, prime, prime. Sand all over the wallpaper with thick-grit
sandpaper, but especially the seams. Not just the seams, though;
you've gotta smooth out all those little imperfections that the paper
is hiding but that will come through when you've got a flat single
color over it. Then prime with an oil-based (not water-based) primer.
Then sand again - you'll see what still needs to be smoothed out after
you prime. Then prime again. Rinse and repeat until you're satisfied
but for me it has never taken more than two sandings and priming coats.

It is still a lot of work but it is less work than stripping wallpaper
and I honestly think that you will probably end up with better looking
walls at the end of the process. If you've got layers and layers of
wallpaper that just won't come off, you're just going to kill your
walls trying to force it.

clipped
It is still a lot of work but it is less work than stripping wallpaper
and I honestly think that you will probably end up with better looking
walls at the end of the process. If you've got layers and layers of
wallpaper that just won't come off, you're just going to kill your
walls trying to force it.

All those layers of paper offered protection to your nice, real plaster
walls. I've never had trouble getting paper off - coarse sandpaper to
score it, spray with water, wait, scrape. Messy but no big deal.

In article .com,
says...

Gwen Morse wrote:
I had ugly wallpaper in my eat-in-kitchen. I tore it down. It wasn't
the normal "strip-able" wallpaper, and I only found that out when it
was too late.

I don't really want to cover the resulting wall with wallpaper,
although I will do that if it's absolutely necessary. I really prefer
to just fix up and paint the wall.
What are some options that just require elbow grease and tiny
financial outlays (like, less than $100)? I haven't tried steaming it
yet, but, I don't know that a steamer will work where the score/Diff
process failed.

You can paint right over wallpaper. My wife and I have now done it in
several rooms in our house.

My house is a 1923 colonial that obviously had wallpaper applied to
most of its rooms in, probably, 1923. Literally every room in the
house except the dining room was wallpapered when we got it. We pulled
up a couple corners of it when we looked at the house the first couple
times and figured it wouldn't be too difficult to get it off. Boy were
we wrong. We also tried DIF and ended up just doing a whole bunch of
damage to our walls after finding out it was just layer upon layer upon
layer of paper and trying to get it all off. It was like going back
through a time machine seeing all these different wallpapers. It took
me the better part of a week to get one 2x2 square foot section of our
kitchen done, and by the time I got down to bare plaster, my wall had a
noticeable dip in it from my scraping and sanding, and it was no longer
smooth.

Eventually we said "screw it" and decided to just paint over it. As
we've gone along we've sort of perfected the process. The first room
we did (that kitchen) didn't turn out all that great but it's still
better than looking at either wallpaper or damaged walls. There is
some bubbling of the paper, though, and some seams.

But the room I'm doing now - the living room - is turning out great.
This room has a wallpaper runner along the top, which means big seams
if I didn't do anything about it. The secret is to sand, sand, sand,
then prime, prime, prime. Sand all over the wallpaper with thick-grit
sandpaper, but especially the seams. Not just the seams, though;
you've gotta smooth out all those little imperfections that the paper
is hiding but that will come through when you've got a flat single
color over it. Then prime with an oil-based (not water-based) primer.
Then sand again - you'll see what still needs to be smoothed out after
you prime. Then prime again. Rinse and repeat until you're satisfied
but for me it has never taken more than two sandings and priming coats.

It is still a lot of work but it is less work than stripping wallpaper
and I honestly think that you will probably end up with better looking
walls at the end of the process. If you've got layers and layers of
wallpaper that just won't come off, you're just going to kill your
walls trying to force it.


In my kitchen remod I discovered all the layers of colors and wallpapers - the
soft green and folky small-patterned wallpaper that looks like the first decor
in 1960, the bright orange-yellow that must have gone with the old
avocado-and-yellow linoleum under the current layer of linoleum, the darker blue
that I painted over when I moved into the house twelve years ago.

I removed a wallpaper border with no problem. But, in prepping the eat-in area
which has two pass-through's in the two walls adjoining it, I discovered the
first wallpaper which was under that. I tried to remove it and that took some
doing, until I discovered that the metal corner beads of the pass-through
cutouts were *over* the wallpaper. Yikes. So, I decided that, clearly, the
wallpaper was adhering just fine to the wall (else I wouldn't be sweating so
much over removing it) and decided screw this and patched what I done so far and
painted over it again.

Looks fine.

Short of re-sheetrocking that whole area, that was the only reasonable thing to
do.

Banty


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