Nearly every room in our house has some kind of textured wallpaper in it. We hate it. In some rooms the wallpaper has then be PAINTED OVER. We knew that this might be a mission to sort out. Some people advised that we just basically paint over the wallpaper and live with it, but not only do we hate it, but we want to do it right if we’re going to do it at all. We decided to start in the spare room, figuring that a) it’s super ugly with textured wallpaper which has been painted yellow, bright blue windowsills and messy edges and b) good practice room because no one really goes in there.
At first we thought we’d have to hire a steamer, and had investigated the local hire store for prices. Steamers are hired out for about $80-100 per day. We weren’t sure about how many days we’d need to hire it for but realised it could quite quickly be expensive. A guy Darren works with then told us about his experience – they got a tool called a Paper Tiger and scored the wallpaper with it. Once the paper is well scored, they sprayed it with a 50/50 vinegar and water solution. After 2-3 minutes of letting the solution soak in they scraped it off with a putty knife/scraper.
We decided to give this method a go, so we got a Paper Tiger to rough up the paper and then used an old Spray ‘n’ Wipe bottle to put the vinegar in. The Paper Tiger is better than a stanley knife for the perforations as it is less easy to score too deeply on the wall. Once we’d perforated the paper and sprayed it on, all we had to do was push gently at the seams of the wallpaper and away it came…so easy! Mostly the backing came away on the paper, but sometimes it was left behind. In these cases we just repeated the process – the more saturated the paper was the easier it was to pull away.
Within an hour we had a massive pile of soggy wallpaper and I was so pleased! Now we can save the cost of a steamer – though I expect we’ll be getting through quite a bit of vinegar by the time the whole house is done.