No matter how neat it may have seemed at one point, wallpaper sucks. It’s ugly. It’s a pain to hang, and a bigger pain to remove.
We’ve seen some pretty ugly wallpaper in our searching so-far. And it’s all been hideous. Please, don’t hang wallpaper.
No matter how neat it may have seemed at one point, wallpaper sucks. It’s ugly. It’s a pain to hang, and a bigger pain to remove.
We’ve seen some pretty ugly wallpaper in our searching so-far. And it’s all been hideous. Please, don’t hang wallpaper.
on the bright side, fixing ugly wallpaper is really easy — it’s honestly not so bad to remove. bad carpets or horrible paint/wallpaper are not things that would make me reject a house.
Reject a house? Not so much. More cringe when I look at it and kick my imagination into gear so I can imagine the interior without it.
As I’ve heard though, removing the stuff varies. If it’s been put up well, it can be pretty easy to remove, but as I understand if it’s not been put up well, it’s a bitch and a half to get down. Is that accurate?
um, I’m not sure about how accurate that might be b/c I’ve never put up the wallpaper I removed.
What works well is to soak the wallpaper with a removing fluid (chemical that breaks down the glue), then score the wallpaper. After that, you can sometimes peel off big swathes of paper. We removed a major amount of wallpaper from this house, and some came off easy while some was hard. I guess you never really know until you try. I will say that even the hard wallpaper eventually came off — we never had to remove any drywall.
Cool. I’ve heard mixed reports – for some it’s been pretty easy, for some it’s been so difficult that they’re still just enduring it. Hopefully we’ll get to skip the mess altogether, but at least it sounds like it might not be too hellish!
Thanks for the detailed breakdown – one daft question though, could you explain a bit more about the scoring of the wallpaper?
oh, yes. we bought this circle with little, um, wheels on the bottom. the wheels were kind of like cogs, so they were sharp enough to cut into the paper but not so sharp that they cut the drywall. We ran the scoring thing over the wallpaper so that it had natural places to pull apart — I tried to do it in a vague pattern. It does result in smaller pieces coming off, but I didn’t find that to be a big issue. Then, we rubbed down the wallpaper with old socks soaked in that solution (I’ll have to ask my mom for the name — perhaps it was Dap?) and started peeling. I kept a grocery bag on my wrist so all the paper could go in there, and we laid down a few sections of painting floorcloths to keep it cleaner. It took a couple of hours to do our whole front entry way, but it gets trance-like after awhile.
At the end, we had to use a putty knife to scrape off some more stubborn bits, and then we sanded any part that was rough. It was repainted, and it’s now impossible to tell there was ever wallpaper.
You can also paint over the wallpaper, if you like the texture but not the look. I don’t advise it — someone did that in one of our rooms, and I think it looks gross. But it is definitely possible to do, and it’d be fine if you like a textured wall.
the chemical is Diff (just asked my mom ^^)
Ah. Thank you, that makes much more sense now.