Okay, started rehabbing my latest project today. No water yet so I pack up my vinegar and water jugs from home to start stripping wallpaper! Who’d a thunk you can put 7 layers of wallpeper and two layers of paint in a non specific order??
Gotta love it.!
I’ve gotten to the point that the huge amount of work I have to put in to remove wall paper and refinish the walls is more than just gutting the room and replacing the sheetrock,… and I get a better quality and better looking job when its finished.
I hate wallpaper.
jmd_forest
Wallpaper is pure evil developed by the devil. Spent 2.5 days stripping wallpaper off woodpaneling so I could paint the paneling.
It was over plaster walls that are in pretty good shape and ahhhh, it’s done now. If you let the water and vinegar really soak in it kind of peels really good, scraper comes in handy too.
Using one of those wallpaper perforators beforehand really lets the vinegar and water get behind the paper.
JP
Just be sure when you use these ‘Paper Tigers’ that you don’t apply a lot of pressure - you can leave holes all over the wall below. You want to push just hard enough to make a pin-prick hole for the solution to get into…
Keith
I’m shopping FOR wallpaper right now to put in a shacky little rental house. It’s going to be fake log cabin walls, and fake wood boards in the kitchen.
You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, right? I can’t make that little tear-down cottage, squatting in the dirt, look like anything other than a rustic cabin.
Now a rustic cabin, done right, looks warm, cozy and inviting. That can be done with wallpaper that looks just like log cabin walls. I stole this idea from an Oklahoma pancake restaurant interior. So if you all are tearing out the wallpaper–is it really that bad-looking?
Furnishedowner
[[[…Now a rustic cabin, done right, looks warm, cozy and inviting…]]]
You bet. Cabins go over well here in ski country. Except, a ratty little shack with fake printed wall paper that is trying to look like wood is not going to look like a nice little rustic cabin.
It’s going to look like a crappy little shack with cheap wall paper printed to look like fake wood. It will look like the landlord is too cheap to even purchase crummy cheapo fake wood paneling.
If you want to turn your junker into a rustic cabin, buy the 1 X6 cedar or pine and panel it and peg the ends. Add a wide pine plank floor.
I’ve paneled a room with cedar bender boards ($.99 for an 8 ft piece, 4 inches wide), trimmed it with high gloss white wood trim, and it looked mighty good. However, I wouldn’t trust tenants to not damage such thin wood. Plus bender board will give you splinters if you aren’t careful. Seriously not suitable for tenants.
But then, hey, maybe your tenants like to live in a place that looks like a 1940’s extra cheap, in-the-middle-of-nowhere, courtyard motel room.
Thanks for raining on my head, Tatertot.
But you are wrong. I had already seen the log cabin paper --NOT cheap–in a high-end decorating magazine. Then I sat for an hour in that pancake restaurant in Oklahoma and just ate up that mellow, warm atmosphere. Customers were getting up and running their hands over the walls to see if they were real.
Have you never seen the amazing effects people get with faux painting, etc? I would NEVER use the fake wood paneling, that thin stuff with lines on it.
That little cabin is getting bid today on an all-new bathroom. I have tile that looks EXACTLY LIKE WOOD for the floor. Expensive stuff that I got from a “mis-order” in an expensive decorator store.
The rest of the floor is old oak. Easy to clean and then polyurethane with defects and all. The popcorn/cottage cheese ceiling will be scraped and made to look like old plaster.
I have used wood board for below the table rail.
For your info., 1940’s little motor coach motels are all the rage with young people. There is an old Teepee motel in Arizona that was full of Brits the last time I was there. Nostalgia is huge.
I agree with you that crap is crap. I don’t do crap. Many times I overhear my tenants on their cell phones when I check them in…“You won’t believe where I’m staying! You’ve gotta come visit me!”
Furnishedowner
Just encountered a room someone before me had stripped the wall paper and left a mess.Some of the sheetrock paper was taken off also.I was really trying to save this base/door trim because it’s one peice real wood you can’t get anymore.
I gotta good sheetrock man that is used to anything I throw at him.He said spray oil based kilz over it and I’l skim it and float then texture it.And now it looks as great as the rest of the house does with new sheetrock.Oh and never just texture over wall paper,it will bubble up and waste your time.
Had one house where the paint was so thick over the wall paper that you couldn’t even tell it was papered. I sprayed out the whole interior of that house. All went well until I got to the bathroom and saw the bubbles in the paper after I sprayed. I wasn’t very happy as I had to strip it down after the fact and start over.
Justin,
I feel your pain on that.Sometimes it’s best to just re sheetrock it,you can go over it sometimes with 3/8 if it does’nt screw up your trim spacing.I would if possible because by code when you open up walls you’re supposed to pull permits and that can open a new can of worms,electrical,plumbing nightmares.
This information is very helpful, as I’ve faced the problem before with my other room. In the process of removing the wallpaper, scratchs were left on the wall which looks very ugly and cost me couple of bugs to fix it.
Thanks.
we rip it all down fast and get a nice layer of skim coat then sand like hell and paint over…good luck