Taking off wallpaper on completely unfinished drywall ?

[riu girl]

We moved into our house 18 years ago not knowing that the original owners had wallpapered almost the entire house not to completed walls, but to simply unfinished drywall.

We would like to start taking down the wallpaper (it is UGLY to say the least and I have been staring at it for almost 2 decades). When we used regular wallpaper remover when we tried to take strips/pieces of wallpaper off we are also getting chunks of drywall with it.

Any advice on how to take off the wallpaper would be great since I am so sick of looking at it (entrance, living room, dining room, bedrooms, bathroom) YUCK!!! It has to go.

What I would love to do is to simply hire a contractor to come in while I am away on vacation and have him remove it, finish the drywall and then paint the entire house, but I think that this would be terribly expensive. Instead I think we will tackle it ourselves room by room over the next couple years.

Thanks

 

[mickilee]

ick!
You could try hot hot water on a rag. soak the paper and carefully peel it off.
After 18 yrs.. not seeing it come off easy..


Ps love your name..

Riu.. the palace....

 

[Bonnie40]

After struggling with removing wallpaper, someone told me that using fabric softner in a spray bottle works wonders....haven't tried it myself yet, but worth a go....

 

[Disney Ontario]

We are doing the same right now. We have no problem getting the first layer off then we use a spray bottle with wamr water and spray the backing. After a few minutes there is no trouble.Our bedroom wallpaper looks in great shape for after 17 years so we might just paint over.

 

[llaxton]

We bought our house in 1989 and in my infintite 22 year old wisdom we had 6rooms wallpapered. In 2005 it started coming down! We rented a machine from Home Depot not very expensive and so easy to get down. We ended up buying a texture sprayer on clearance and DH sprayed the drywall, we used Kilz and then painted over it - painted walls look great.

 

[Lisa Anne Colling]

My in laws had the same issue and had to hire a professional to come in, (they are older and it was a little more labour intensive then the thought it would be.). The wall paper guy removed the top layer of the wall paper first after running a sponge of warm water over it. What was left on the wall was a thin layer of paper and the glue. Take a spray bottle with vinegar and spray that down. That helps break down the wall paper glue. From there you should be able to srape off the rest. Hope that helps, seemed to work well for him and he does it all the time!
Good Luck!

 

[MikeJ]

Speaking from experience, this will be messy. I would venture that most of the people who have posted here are removing paper from walls that have been properly primed and/or painted. Yes, steaming or spraying will loosen the adhesive to allow the paper to come down, but you will need to be very careful if you use a scraper. Because the drywall is unfinished, the adhesive from the paper will have soaked into the paper coating on the drywall and if you're not careful you will end up removing part of that as well - as you've discovered.

When we removed the paper from our kitchen a few years ago we had exactly the same problem. I soaked the heck out of the wallpaper so I didn't need to use much force scraping the paper off. Even so, I spent several days doing repair work on the drywall after the paper was down because of damage done to the wall. It's a very fine line - using too much water is as bad (or maybe worse) than not using enough.

Maybe check over on the Community Board as well. There may very well be posts over there addressing this issue.

Good luck to you.

- Mike

 

[AndyMcV]

If it's really bad, you may want to consider putting another sheet of drywall over top and just start over.

 

[FergusBC]

From personal experience - don't use a steamer! We tried it. Hubby had to get very good very fast at repairing drywall

Lots of wet sponge applications and careful scraping and lots and lots of time...That was the only thing that worked for us. Fortunately at the time I was on mat leave and it was only in the guest room.

We were so traumatized that we waited another four years before we tackled the incredibly ugly wallpaper in our own bedroom. To our surprise and delight, it had been applied on a properly primed wall so peeled off like a dream. Still doesn't stop me from having nightmares about the weeks it took us to redo the guest room.

 

[tgropp]

After struggling with removing wallpaper, someone told me that using fabric softner in a spray bottle works wonders....haven't tried it myself yet, but worth a go....

This worked wonders for us and we were taking wallpaper off of 130 year old plaster. Just measure 1/4 fabric softener to 3/4 warm water. Let it soak into the wallpaper....and good luck.