Comments on: How To: Strip Wallpaper

By: Cute Cathy

Cute Cathy — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 05:22:00 +0000

I had to strip six rooms of wallpaper in order to get my condo to sell (nobody would even look at it twice, since it had horrid eighties-floral stuff up! I didn’t put it up myself, but I didn’t consider it a deal-breaker when I was buying the condo,) and it was awful to take down. The walls hadn’t been sized, and in one case, had only been given a single coat of primer. What finally made it survivable was a product called Wal-Wik that consisted of a good stripper, a garden-type pressure sprayer, and large sheets of what was essentially lightweight non-woven fabric (like sew-in interfacing) that you soaked in the stripper and then smoothed over the perforated wallpaper and periodically dampened with the sprayer, assuring that the wallpaper stayed moist long enough for the glue to actually dissolve. If I gave it enough time (a half hour or longer) the paper came off with very little problems. If I rushed it, drywall paper came down with it, leaving the walls a mess. Anyone who has to strip wallpaper, you have my sympathy!

By: Felix Stankevicius

Felix Stankevicius — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 23:51:00 +0000

It is also good if they sized the wall before putting up the wallpaper. They did not do this in my house and part of the drywall paper came off too.

By: dollfriend

dollfriend — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:11:00 +0000

If you’re lucky, the wallpaper will have been one of the easy stripping ones, which will just peel off for you! It can be weird, on the same wall, because some will just about “fall” off, and other spots will be almost impossible to get off. That’s the way it was in our bathroom, in the old house, but the sewing room paper came off almost by itself.