Removing wallpaper can rank as one of the most frustrating home improvement jobs out there. Here are some tips to conquer this DIY drudgery so you can get on to the fun stuff.
When the Fix-It Farmer and I bought our brand new home in the mid ’90s, wallpaper was having a moment. Along with carpet in the bathroom. …Just no… We had the opportunity to select wallpapers for the kitchen, the two full baths and the powder room.
When I say “we,” I really mean me because my hubby doesn’t care much about décor. I view that as a win-win. I can do what I want, and he doesn’t have to make the decisions.
At the time, I requested paint instead of wallpaper in the kids’ bathroom and that the builder replace the carpet with vinyl in that room (CARPET IN A KIDS’ BATH?!?! ARE YOU INSANE?!?! no amount of exclamation points would suffice here). I wrote about our home buying and remodeling plans in this post.
For the other three spaces, I selected the lovely floral and fruit motifs I found so enchanting at the time. Now, more than 20 years later, they look dated and dumpy. The only wallpaper I still enjoy is the powder room, which has a vintage look and hasn’t had the wear and tear of the kitchen and master bath.
The master bath is the first big project on my lengthy to-do list at our Texas domicile. In my excitement, I started removing wallpaper when I first started planning the remodel. I waited until the hubby was on a business trip to start taking it down.
He would say that I may have neglected to tell him in advance. I wouldn’t advise you to take this approach because it became a small source of friction. Not big, mind you, but getting ready every day in a work zone for, ummm… three years can wear on a body.
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Methods for removing wallpaper
With certain types of wallpaper and prep methods, sometimes you can just pull off sheets by hand without much resistance. Because our paper was applied to primed but not painted drywall and — I suspect — without any sizing solution, it has been a grueling, frustrating, beat down to get to bare walls. In places, pieces of the drywall surface came away with the wallpaper.
I tried three removal methods over the course of the project.
First method
The first was to buy a paper tiger (LOVE that term) to score the paper and a spray bottle
of wallpaper removal solution. I used a 5-in-1 tool as a scraper.
For some properly prepared walls, this inexpensive method might work great. For my walls, not so much.
This mode yielded mostly fragments the size of my thumb. I quickly looked for a faster option.
Second method
Not wanting to spend funds on a steamer, I chose a promising method on sale at Lowes at that time called Simple Strip from Wallwik (I don’t think they carry it anymore, and it’s more expensive on their website). You mixed a solution with warm water in a sprayer and had more warm water mixed with solution in a bucket. The kit included the concentrated solution, several long sheets of fiber paper (think giant dryer sheet) and a long scraper to lift paper off the wall in sheets.
First, score the paper. Then, submerge a long sheet in the bucket and carefully slap it on
the scored wall. Spray down the top with more warm solution and wait for five minutes. Take off the fiber sheet and stick it back in the bucket. Then use the long scraper or the 5-in-1 tool to lift off the paper.
In some places, it yielded sections as long as my arm, but in most places, I just got hand-sized fragments. And streams of solution dripped down the wall and onto the baseboard and the yucky old carpet. YES, CARPET IN MY MASTER BATH! YUCK! I can’t wait to get rid of it.
Now, more than a year had passed . I decided it was time to invest in a steamer.
Third method
I purchased the Wagner Power Steamer 705 on Amazon. Since I still have to remove wallpaper in my kitchen, I decided it would be a good investment. It came with two different heads, one the same dimensions as a spiral notebook and the other just bigger than a deck of cards. The smaller head allows you to get into tighter spaces.
With a steamer, you score the paper with your paper tiger, then set the head of the steamer on the wall for 30 seconds. Then you can grab an edge or lift an edge with your scraper. This time, I still got pieces ranging from arm’s length to thumb size. But it was faster since it didn’t involve the spraying of any solution. A little excess water dripped down the wall, but this time, it contained no chemicals.
I still had to go back with the steamer after the initial removal to get pieces of backing that remained on the wall. Again, I suspect improper pre-wallpaper preparation made the job WAY more difficult than it needed to be.
Recommended method for removing wallpaper
For anyone out there starting a project of removing wallpaper, I’d suggest informing your spouse and testing a small area to see how easily the paper comes away from the wall. If the wallpaper is difficult to remove, I’d suggest getting a steamer.
The steamer did the best job of removing wallpaper fast. The same wall area that took me two hours with the steamer took at least six hours with the other methods. On my 150 square-foot bathroom, I’ve probably spent about 33 hours so far. I still have a floral border to remove above the Hollywood vanity lights and a few (100) areas to take off paper backing.
Because the wallpaper damaged some of the drywall, I will need to sand, clean, spackle and texture the walls before I paint. But that’s a post for another day.
The lovely 1990s floral border I selected because I didn’t want to limit my color choices for towels. It kinda makes me sad now.