Please pardon mismatched pages as we do a little renovating of our own.

Knowing How to Remove Wallpaper May Keep You From Wallpapering Ever Again !

It’s a fact, once you know how to remove wallpaper and have actually done it, you may never want wallpaper in your house again. The thing is, there is so much choice in wallpaper these days, it can be hard to NOT want it.

I’ll let you wrestle with the new wallpaper dilemma while I tell you how to remove wallpaper that is already on your walls. It is a MUST that old wallpaper comes down before new goes up. That goes for paint too. Painting over wallpaper is a mistake you will never make twice.
It not only makes the wallpaper start to peel up, but it accentuates any creases or bubbles or tears that may be in it.

Do yourself a favor and get this done the right way the first time.

First, shut off the power in the room you will be working in. Bring in a task light on an extension cord plugged into a socket in a different room if you need more than daylight.

Begin at the top corner of the paper. Find a corner and get it up just enough to grab onto it and with a little luck you can pull it down and get a good amount off.
It may really be a lot of luck you need, anyway, keep at it until you have pulled off as much as you can.

If the existing wallpaper is not more than 5-10 years old, you may be lucky and it may have been made to strip off easily. If it is vinyl wallpaper up there, you might pull most of the face off but the backing, I’m afraid will have to come off the hard way.

We move on to how to remove wallpaper that is left on the wall. This is where the scraper and wallpaper remover come in. Dilute the remover solution according to the instructions on the bottle. You can apply this now to the wall using a sponge or a spray bottle, whichever you prefer.
In either case, you really need to soak it, sometimes 2 or 3 times to be able to get all the adhesive off the wall.

You will use the rounded corner scraper (those sharp corner scrapers easily gouge the wall, especially when frustration sets in…take it from me!!) and scrape that gunk off the wall.

After about an hour of this, noticing that perhaps you are 1/6 of the way done, you may be considering putting up paneling instead. Now, although I completely understand how this may sound great, you will be cheating yourself out of one of those great “I Did It Myself” moments.

You may even come up with a brilliant "how to remove wallpaper" tip that you could publish and share with everyone else taking on this challenge.
If you choose to continue on your path, read on; your reward will come.

It works best to start scraping at the top and work your way down. Keep up the sponging or spraying on of solution and using a lot of elbow grease. Keep that scraper clean, wiping the gunk off on a paint tray or rag. You can use a bit of TSP solution when you can’t get anymore off. Use a plastic abrasive pad along with the TSP to get the last bits of adhesive off.

After the walls are completely dry, you can paint or…dare I say…put up new wallpaper. Make it the strippable kind please!

Looking for more things to fix? Visit our home repairs page.