While I didn’t have a lot of wallpaper to remove when I moved into the house (thank god), the stuff that was there challenged me. Instinctively, I bought and tried a slew of wallpaper removal products that were on the shelves at my local DIY stores. Without getting into details of what products I tried and which worked better than others, I’ll say this: Water worked best.
My ultimate success was achieved by scoring the wallpaper (typical scoring tool used), soaking a large sponge in warm water, and then proceeding to “wash” the wallpaper and wet it as much as possible (keep a towel on hand to limit how many drips reach the floor). Once the paper had absorbed the water, a flat edge scraper was the only tool I needed to cleanly strip the paper from the surface. I tried this technique on both plaster and drywall successfully, and can also report that it worked on old (circa 1970’s) wallpaper and newer (early 2000’s – featuring much stronger glue) wallpaper.
Anyways, here’s a photo I snapped to show, side-by-side, how spray remover worked compared to water after soaking for 1 minute:
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