Stripping the wall paper from hell

[tfish]

I have started stripping some wall paper, its normal bog standard backing paper and it came of ok-ish. Then iv discovered what i thought was the bare wall is in fact backing paper from many years gone thats been painted with emulsion! this has created a skin on the backing paper thats almost like cling film. Iv scoured the paper and soaked it, used a steamer etc but its still a nightmare. iv got to peel ech inch away by picking with my fingers then i can access the paper beneath a remove as normal.

its already took up more time than entire rooms alltogether, is there any tips on what to do here? if its pv'ad could i skim over it at all?

i would be quciker to knock the wall down and rebuild at the speeds it taking!!! aaaaaaaaaaah

 

[johntidiy]

Hi
You have to be patient, use soapy hot water, wet at least a 3m length of wall 6 times before you touch it use a flat brush and scrub the water in. You will need a decent scraper, either a sprung steel hand scraper 1.5" or blade on a stick type to get more pressure. Wet Wet Wet is the only way, try it, I did this for 15 years.

 

[tfish]

cheers will try this tomo

 

[stevebamford]

You could try one of these

http://www.acehardwareoutlet.com/productDetails.aspx?SKU=998009052

It makes lots of small holes in the paper to let the steam in

They are excellent - don't push too hard though as it will make small holes in the plaster (not a prob if you are skimming it !)

 

[tfish]

i was using one of those tools, the stanley version but it wasnt having much success.

no matter how much soaking i was doing this wasnt helping once i got to the layer of emulsion.

we where talking about taking hammers to the wall and taking it back to the brick as it was taking so long then one of the plasterers hit the jackpot.

the trick was to take the top layer of normal wallpaper off and leave the emulsion surface underneath undamaged. then work a meter squared area of the emulsion painted paper with the steamer, NOT touching it at all with the stripping knife and being careful not to damage the layer by over heating.. then remove the steamer and give the then sticky and stretchy emulsion about 90 seconds to cool... as it cooled it hardened JUST enuff to peel back! once peeled back the paper underneath could be removed as normal. If you tried to peel befire 90 seconds was up the emulsion just came away like wet paper in finger tip sizes and if u waited longer than 90 seconds it dried out and just cracked!

crazy!