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