Painting after removing wallpaper

Moved into a house where the previous owners got trigger happy with wallpaper - every room is lined with the stuff, and I don't like any of it! :surprised:

So the plan is to remove it and go good ol' magnolia to give us a blank canvas to work with. Never worked with wallpaper before, so we thought we'd try one of the upstairs rooms. Here's a breakdown of what we've done and where we are right now:

• Used a steam wallpaper stripper to remove wallpaper - it came off nice and easy. Not sure what kind of wallpaper it was, but the top layer peeled away and the 'underlay?' peeled off with a bit of steam. However, it did take patches of paint with it, leaving walls that look patchy - mostly painted, but some big bits where the paint has come away leaving the bare plaster. House is only seven years old, so plaster is in good condition.
• Sanded down and removed any flaky bits. This helped reduce the ridge between the paint and the plaster, made it feel very smooth but we had a feeling the patches may still show through the paint to follow.
• Applied a mist coat - 80 per cent matt emulsion, 20 per cent water.
• Applied a neat coat - 100 per cent matt emulsion.

After all that, it doesn't look all that bad but if you go up close and inspect you can make out the areas where the patches used to be. We've got lots of time and lots of patience, so we want to get it absolutely right. Just not sure how to go about it.

We could maybe:
Add a few more coats and hope it evens out completely (unlikely, I think)
Remove all the paint to leave bare plaster and then re-do the mist coat and paint over (is it even possible to remove the existing paint?)
Get something like Ronseal Smooth and Repair to cover all the patches then sand down again (never used the stuff and it's quite expensive at £20+ a pot)
Get someone out to re-skim the walls (haven't had any quotes, but sounds expensive)

Or is there another option?

*Edit* Forgot to add, we do not want to put wallpaper on again, including lining or anything of that sort.

go buy a proper plasters float with some really thin finishing plaster mixed up to help fill the problem areas, once dry blast with an electric sander until flat.

As gonz0 says, or just sand the paint off back to bare plaster (time consuming and dusty)

Parm, that's probably the reason the place was wallpapered originally - the walls required too much work to get them into a paintable state.

When I had one of the rooms here re-wallpapered the decorator still went round filling/smoothing, and it helped massively. That said, it was still not flat enough to have painted :(

Often people put up wall paper as it better at hidding irregular wall surfaces, if you don\'t like the wall paper, you can do what we did, strip it off, then put lining paper up, and paint that. Painting directly onto a wall that has previously been painted often does not produce the results you might hope. Do atleast wash the walls well with sugar soap, after you have taken the paper down.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Parm

Moved into a house where the previous owners got trigger happy with wallpaper - every room is lined with the stuff, and I don't like any of it! :surprised:

---

Consider yourself lucky - my living room, kitchen, hallway, stairs and landing have all got artexed walls. Old artex contains asbestos so I'm not risking sanding it. Getting someone to skim all of that would cost a fortune, and I've never done any plastering in my life.

All the ceilings in the house are artexed, but that's not too uncommon, and the bedrooms have woodchip wallpaper which doesn't want to come off easily, even with steam/heatguns.

Some previous owner *really* liked textured surfaces and all I can do is paint them!

Bagnaj97..

You probably have researched it, but if not, this link might be useful

http://www.asbestosadvisor.net/asbes...ing_artex.aspx

Well, with my Decorator head on -

You've got a few options for rough walls -
1. leave it and just live with it. Try to feather the edges of any bare areas out and then seal the whole lot with a decent primer sealer (like Zinsser 123) before applying 2 coats of emulsion.

2. mix up a sloppy mix of filler (polyfilla or toupret are my faves at the moment). Then spread this mix around the room using a caulker (large PVC blade - 6" wide or more) wherever there is a rough/low area, rub it all down (don't use a really rough paper though!).

3. Line the room with 1000 (poss even 1200) gauge lining paper, leave for a day or two, then apply 2 coats of emulsion. This will show vertical lines unless you are very very careful.

BTW - you don't need a steamer for most papers. Get hold of a garden sprayer and spray the wallpaper several times - it will soak in and you will be able to use a scraper to scrape the paper off. I think I've used a steamer once in the last 3 years now.

Hope that helps

Adrian

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ACInman

Well, with my Decorator head on -

You've got a few options for rough walls -
1. leave it and just live with it. Try to feather the edges of any bare areas out and then seal the whole lot with a decent primer sealer (like Zinsser 123) before applying 2 coats of emulsion.

2. mix up a sloppy mix of filler (polyfilla or toupret are my faves at the moment). Then spread this mix around the room using a caulker (large PVC blade - 6" wide or more) wherever there is a rough/low area, rub it all down (don't use a really rough paper though!).

3. Line the room with 1000 (poss even 1200) gauge lining paper, leave for a day or two, then apply 2 coats of emulsion. This will show vertical lines unless you are very very careful.

BTW - you don't need a steamer for most papers. Get hold of a garden sprayer and spray the wallpaper several times - it will soak in and you will be able to use a scraper to scrape the paper off. I think I've used a steamer once in the last 3 years now.

Hope that helps

Adrian

---

Excellent! A HEXUS decorator!

Thanks for the tips all!! Handy having a discussion about this, as a lot of what I've found on the web relates to walls that are in bad condition and need serious work.

Just to reiterate, our house is quite new (6-7 years) and the walls are in really good condition. Seems like the paintwork was quite nice too, but the previous owners were seriously into their wallpaper and decided to put it up in almost every room. We've since been in some neighbours' houses and there's no wallpaper in sight - the walls look so much better!

Anyhow, to help illustrate the problem, here are two pics of what I now describe as the 'test wall':

http://forums.hexus.net/attachment.p...3&d=1338539051

http://forums.hexus.net/attachment.p...7&d=1338539108

The pictures aren't great, but this wall was previously lined in wallpaper. The top layer of the wallpaper was stripped off by hand (it came away easily) and the bottom layer (some sort of adhesive backing, I guess?) was peeled off after using a steamer.

Most of the wall has come out ok but in removing the wallpaper bits of paint have come off with it. The amount of paint loss is greater in certain areas and I'm not sure what's causing that. I'm wondering if the steamer is too intensive for a job that's relatively easy, so tomorrow I'm gonna try removing the wallpaper on the adjacent wall by just spraying water on it as per Adrian's suggestion - thanks chap!

Worth adding that a lot more paint came off in the previous room - it was a whole lot more patchy and took numerous coats of emulsion to go over.

Not entirely sure which will be the best option, but I'm going to try a few things this weekend. Not keen on the idea of lining paper, so I'm gonna try filling the gaps with polyfilla and sanding over them, and on another wall I'm gonna try using some really coarse sandpaper to see if I can get all the paint off and start afresh on plaster. That's the theory at least... :undecided