More about the bad wallpaper (in hopes it will help)
 

When you run into atypical situations like this, all you can do is
experiment until you find what works best, your ideas sound like they are
worth trying. Worse case, you end up skim coating the wall with mud and
starting fresh.

The tiny scraps left on the wall may only need sanding before you can prime
or paper over


"Gwen Morse" wrote in message
...
Okay, first of all, thanks for the advice.

I think I've taken out of it...

1) Improperly-removed wallpaper sucks.
2) Wet the paper thoroughly to get it off - in particular,
"thoroughly" can be over several days.
3) Steaming may or may not work, but, it's possible to at least try it
"cheaply".

With that information, here's more information about my walls.

It's 2 walls in the corner of my eat-in-kitchen. One wall has a
window. The other wall has baseboard heat along the foot of the wall.
The wall with the baseboard heat also has an electric outlet. They're
also both "outside" walls (which is to say that the other side of each
wall is just the exterior of the house).

Having examined it more thoroughly (ie: trying soaking it and scraping
it again), it doesn't appear it was painted over. In fact, it seems
that they put the initial layer of wallpaper up over bare drywall with
absolutely _no_ prepping or primer.

So when I soak the stuck-on backing, I also soak the drywall. When I
run the paper tiger across the wall, quite often it scores the drywall
as well. At least, on the wall with the little strips of paper left
behind.

As described in my original post, there's some sort of weird wall
paper backing that's still glued firmly to the drywall, in odd
sheets/patterns. It didn't come off neatly, nor did it "stay behind"
neatly. One wall is almost all drywall with just little (stubborn)
fingerlength-sized flakes left behind. The other wall is almost all
paper, with handprint-sized gaps down to the drywall.

My next plan would be to soak the paper multiple times over the next
few days, but, that will soak the drywall as well. Is it possible to
_only_ scrape the paper off without gouging the drywall underneath
(would...for example, a giant "razor-edge" scraper of some sort be a
better option than a normal paper scraper?).

I want to emphasize that I'm really willing to invest time and labor
into the job. What's frustraing me is that I keep tearing the actual
drywall and so I'm missing some solution that will soften the
wallpaper backing and allow me to tease up their edges, without
tearing the drywall as well.

Gwen

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