Before I get into this post, I would like to tell you how we managed to figure out what worked best for us. The very first thing I did on our house was walk in the master bedroom and rip a piece of the wallpaper off, not knowing ANYTHING about wallpaper (other than ours was ugly) I thought what I saw underneath was the wall at first. Later that day it hit me that, uh duh that’s not the wall. I obviously had no clue what this was all about. All wallpaper is different, and ours has been different in every single room so far.
I asked Sherwin Williams… how do I remove wallpaper? After much talking later I walked out with DIF and a wallpaper scorer. I was encouraged, confident, and excited that this wasn’t going to be hard at all! Bull.
Before you start doing anything with wallpaper attempt to tear it off dry to see if it has 1 or 2 “layers”. If it has 2 layers, the top layer may come off very easily. After you get to the glue or wallpaper backing layer you’ll have to scrap off continue with these tips…
What’s the best product to coat the wallpaper in?
It’s not this, folks. I will not tell you this product doesn’t work, because it does! But for how much it costs to completely saturate our wallpaper we purchased 4 bottles and $28 later when our room was barely 1/4 the way done, we realized this wasn’t going to work. Oh, and DIF stinks. Sorry, DIF.
The best thing to soak your wallpaper in is a mixture of liquid laundry detergent and HOT water, the hotter the better. Does it burn your hands? That means it a good temperature. Then either take a rag and saturate your wallpaper slowly or use a pump sprayer to do it faster. You should have a “horizontal” spray nozzle otherwise you won’t be able to coat the wall evenly. (We lost ours, so the rag method was best.) As for the mixture, I wasn’t too particular on how much to mix but it was about 1/6th laundry liquid to water. And our walls didn’t smell bad!
Let the mixture sit on your walls for a few minutes. When you’re at this step you’ll realize just how easy or difficult removing the wallpaper in your room will be. (Note: Some wallpaper types like it soaked to come off, while others less soaked.) Now to start scraping…
What should you use to scrap (not “score”) the wallpaper off?
Not this either, folks. From what I learned a wallpaper scorer did not work in our master bedroom, or any other bedrooms we tried it on. It simply made a bunch of holes which made it less possible to tear off “sheets” of the paper. We merely were taking off little pieces since it would rip more easily.
This is what we used, which worked the best. Purchase a plastic (or metal if you’re braver) putty knife, or scraper. Make sure it’s a flexible one, we want to scrape the wall flush and not into it and tearing it up! You can also get a squeegee, which helps with some wallpaper types.
Now what? Simply wet yourself an area you can scrape before it dries. Wet, wait a few minutes, scrape. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. I suggest having music, lots of music!
That’s it? Well, no sadly not even close. Once you have removed all of the “big” pieces of wallpaper you will have glue spots that just won’t come off, bits of paper, and probably a mess at your baseboards if you didn’t have anything catching your water and wet wallpaper. This is where a squeegee helped us for our bedroom, you can use to rub some of the remaining stuff of your wall off. Keep in mind to saturate it again. If nothing else is working try to sand it off.
Having trouble removing all the little bits and pieces? We did in our bedroom. It was awful since it felt like we were removing the wallpaper all over again, but now it was taking even longer since it was tiny little pieces everywhere! Here’s our video and (hilarious looking) invention that saved us HOURS of scraping the whole bedroom again. This is a circular electric sander with a microfiber cloth on it. (It will stick itself to it.) My man could use this better than I could, you should apply enough pressure to where it’s against the wall but still spins freely. We finished the whole room in not even an hour.
Yay, am I done now?! Almost. Simply get a bucket of water and “wash” your wall until it’s clean of any DIF or laundry detergent leftover. Same for your baseboards if they’re messy.
As I mentioned earlier all wallpaper is different. We’ve currently removed it from 3 bedrooms and part of a bathroom. (After that many rooms you will want to ban wallpaper from existence.) Our master bedroom came off in larger pieces with hot water and detergent, it had the top layer and the backing layer of paper which of course the top layer came right off. The second bedroom had it’s one layer come off easily, but there was no backing to scrap off. Instead there was glue residue on the wall itself which we never could entirely get off. I would suggest using an oil based primer over trouble-rooms with residue or leftovers that refuse to come off. Sand, prime, paint and it shouldn’t be a problem. The third bedroom which so happened to be my office took the longest, which made me consider giving up. It called for scalding hot water with detergent and it came off in small pieces. Should I run across a room like that again I’ll hire someone to do it.
I hope this helped you with your wallpaper removal project. Should the project seem too hard or you run out of patience call around for someone who KNOWS how to remove wallpaper well. I’ve found some companies will overcharge because it’s overly time consuming. (As in they are not good at removing it.)
Some past photos of our master bedroom progress:
Thankfully that has been done. (You can see the updated bedroom in the last post.) But we still have 2 bathrooms, a foyer, and the laundry room on our to remove wallpaper from list. How exciting! Haha.
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