Whats the best way to remove wallpaper from plaster walls?
Okay, this stuff (WP Chomp) is amazing in removing wallpaper. You can get it at a Home Depot-type store. We removed the painted-over wallpaper that came with our house and tried several different methods, but this stuff worked best. There is something really satisfying about gently puuuullllllling it off in huge chunks. And it smells good and doesn’t have nasty chemicals.
Paper tigers work pretty well for scoring it, allowing the liquid (hot water, wallpaper stripper) to penetrate. It’s pretty good to have one person score, one person spray, and a third person to scrape. Be patient and let the water really soak in before you try scraping. Use a rag to get off the last little slimy bits. You should probably put a drop cloth down. Use masking tape to tape it to the baseboards all the way around the room (you don’t want any gaps. Trust me, if it gets on the floor, it isn’t coming off…). Be prepared to sweat and hate life for at least one whole day. Probably a weekend if it’s a big room.
If it’s several layers, you might need a combination of tools. When I was a teen my mother and I removed self-stick wallpaper that had been applied with real paste as well, which I imagine would be similar to your layers and age combo. Scoring the paper, applying some sort of stripper to soften it up, and if needed steaming (we rented an actual wallpaper steamer from the local rent-all-tools place). With the stripper alone we could get the paper off in pieces the size of your hand, with the added steam we were able to get to large, newspaper-sized pieces.
There are giant spiked pizza cutters around, that help you puncture the old wallpaper so that steam and/or sprayed on soapy water can penetrate the stuff and then you scrape it of with a big spatula / a stripping knife for wallpaper (just a sharpened spatula). But what’s more important: what kind of material is the wall made of? If its just drywall or wood you might not want to get it too wet. It is definitively easier with more water/steam and sharper scrapers, but it is always miserable work, because of the high humidity and warmth that you deliberately have to create yourself to loosen the wallpaper. But maybe you get lucky and the whole thing can be pulled of as one sheet of a giant paint/wallpaper sandwich. Have you tried that? I never tried jschu’s chomp stuff, but it seems to be made of bacteria/enzymes that eat the wallpaper glue (Methylcellulose, also found in processed foods and cosmetics, yum), that sounds very interesting and seems to be an improvement on the just soapy wat
