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Posted by Banty on June 15, 2006, 9:11 am
basscadet75@yahoo.com says...
>
>Gwen Morse wrote:
>> I had ugly wallpaper in my eat-in-kitchen. I tore it down. It wasn't
>> the normal "strip-able" wallpaper, and I only found that out when it
>> was too late.
>>
>> I don't really want to cover the resulting wall with wallpaper,
>> although I will do that if it's absolutely necessary. I really prefer
>> to just fix up and paint the wall.
>> What are some options that just require elbow grease and tiny
>> financial outlays (like, less than $100)? I haven't tried steaming it
>> yet, but, I don't know that a steamer will work where the score/Diff
>> process failed.
>
>You can paint right over wallpaper. My wife and I have now done it in
>several rooms in our house.
>
>My house is a 1923 colonial that obviously had wallpaper applied to
>most of its rooms in, probably, 1923. Literally every room in the
>house except the dining room was wallpapered when we got it. We pulled
>up a couple corners of it when we looked at the house the first couple
>times and figured it wouldn't be too difficult to get it off. Boy were
>we wrong. We also tried DIF and ended up just doing a whole bunch of
>damage to our walls after finding out it was just layer upon layer upon
>layer of paper and trying to get it all off. It was like going back
>through a time machine seeing all these different wallpapers. It took
>me the better part of a week to get one 2x2 square foot section of our
>kitchen done, and by the time I got down to bare plaster, my wall had a
>noticeable dip in it from my scraping and sanding, and it was no longer
>smooth.
>
>Eventually we said "screw it" and decided to just paint over it. As
>we've gone along we've sort of perfected the process. The first room
>we did (that kitchen) didn't turn out all that great but it's still
>better than looking at either wallpaper or damaged walls. There is
>some bubbling of the paper, though, and some seams.
>
>But the room I'm doing now - the living room - is turning out great.
>This room has a wallpaper runner along the top, which means big seams
>if I didn't do anything about it. The secret is to sand, sand, sand,
>then prime, prime, prime. Sand all over the wallpaper with thick-grit
>sandpaper, but especially the seams. Not just the seams, though;
>you've gotta smooth out all those little imperfections that the paper
>is hiding but that will come through when you've got a flat single
>color over it. Then prime with an oil-based (not water-based) primer.
>Then sand again - you'll see what still needs to be smoothed out after
>you prime. Then prime again. Rinse and repeat until you're satisfied
>but for me it has never taken more than two sandings and priming coats.
>
>It is still a lot of work but it is less work than stripping wallpaper
>and I honestly think that you will probably end up with better looking
>walls at the end of the process. If you've got layers and layers of
>wallpaper that just won't come off, you're just going to kill your
>walls trying to force it.
>
In my kitchen remod I discovered all the layers of colors and wallpapers - the
soft green and folky small-patterned wallpaper that looks like the first decor
in 1960, the bright orange-yellow that must have gone with the old
avocado-and-yellow linoleum under the current layer of linoleum, the darker blue
that I painted over when I moved into the house twelve years ago.
I removed a wallpaper border with no problem. But, in prepping the eat-in area
which has two pass-through's in the two walls adjoining it, I discovered the
first wallpaper which was under that. I tried to remove it and that took some
doing, until I discovered that the metal corner beads of the pass-through
cutouts were *over* the wallpaper. Yikes. So, I decided that, clearly, the
wallpaper was adhering just fine to the wall (else I wouldn't be sweating so
much over removing it) and decided screw this and patched what I done so far and
painted over it again.
Looks fine.
Short of re-sheetrocking that whole area, that was the only reasonable thing to
do.
Banty
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