Never Buy a House with Wallpaper

Although we closed on October 12^th, 2012, since it was a private sale, we were lucky enough to have access to the house beforehand. This allowed us to get a jump on some of the smaller renovations we had planned.

First thing on our list? Remove the pink and white wallpaper in the master bedroom. My initial thought was that this would not be too difficult; the wallpaper didn't even cover the entire wall! Just from the chair-rail to the ceiling, no big deal.

I hopped on Google, did some research, and found that a large number of people seemed to have success with a wallpaper scoring tool, a spray bottle, some fabric softener, and a scraper. Unfortunately, we possessed only one item on that list, and that was the spray bottle. We made our first trip to Menards, and purchased everything but the scoring tool, as a friend happened to own one and let us borrow it.

I cannot accurately describe how poorly this worked. We mixed the correct parts of water and fabric softener, enthusiastically scored the target area, and let the concoction sit for the allotted amount of time. With the first pass of the scraper, I was unable to remove even one inch of material without gouging a small hole in the plaster wall. We rescored the area, applied another liberal coating with the spray bottle, and tried again.



After repeated attempts failed, it became apparent that the wallpaper, applied sometime in the 1970s, had started to part ways with the adhesive used to adhere it to the wall. We found that the actual pink and white wallpaper would come off fairly easily, however, the yellowed adhesive would remain firmly attached to the wall. After an hour or so, we had a 1’ x 1’ area of wallpaper removed, but about 90% of the adhesive remained. The thought of removing the wallpaper face and then sanding the adhesive into oblivion crossed my mind, but a short test run proved this to be an unbelievably poor choice.

You must remember that I had never even seen the inside of a wall before, so the concept of just tearing the plaster down and hanging drywall (which in hindsight, despite the mess, would have been much easier) never even entered my mind; but clearly our method was not working. We needed to try something else.

“Something else” turned out to be an Earlex SteamMaster wallpaper steamer. We rented this thing from Home Depot, lugged it upstairs, filled it up, and turned it on. The machine has a large tank in which the water is heated up, and then the steam travels down a hose to a large 10” x 10” plate with a handle. You press the plate against the wall, hold it there for 20 seconds, and release. The steam is trapped between the plate and the wall and, in theory, permeates into the wallpaper and the adhesive.

We were certainly excited at the prospects of this machine, and put it through a one-hour test; a time-trial similar to our first method. After an hour, we had managed to remove about double the wallpaper from our first attempt. This was only slightly better, until you consider the fact this is also allowed us to remove about 75% of the adhesive as well!

Covered in sweat, and out of ideas, we pressed on for ten hours, working late into the night. We started with me pressing the plate against the wall, and Rachel scraping once I removed it, moving about 10 inches at a time, switching roles occasionally. We found that some areas were much easier than others; some much more difficult. When we finally called it, we had managed to finish 90% of the bedroom. This was somewhat disheartening, as we had recently decided to keep the steamer an extra day to remove the bathroom wallpaper as well. Fortunately, the bathroom is obviously much smaller, and the wallpaper was relatively newer; probably applied in the late 80s or early 90s.

We finished the job the next night, after another long evening of work. The next day was spent spraying more water and fabric softener onto the remaining adhesive, and scraping it off, piece by piece.

After that… patching and sanding. Our bedroom seems to have collected about 20-30 nail, screw, and anchor holes over its 90+ year existence. We pulled them all out, patched them, and sanded them. I also sanded almost the entire wall to remove all the small scrapes and gouges from the wallpaper-removal process. Next, Rachel primed and painted the walls. All in all, it took about two weeks, mostly due to the fact that we were both working full-time jobs, and could only dedicate time on weekends and occasional evenings. We were very happy with the end result, but we both vowed to never even consider purchasing a house with wallpaper again.

Since this was our first project, and that declaration was made over 10 months ago, we've since decided to ease our no-wallpaper policy a bit. If our next home does end up containing some wallpaper, I will definitely rip those walls out. Never again.

A few more shots: