How to Strip Wallpaper from Plaster & Lath Colorado

Steps

1. Pick your spot, spread out newspapers on the floor (or a tarp, painter's dropcloth, old shower curtain, etc);
2. fairly well soak the sponge mop in the bucket of hot water & Start at the top of a wall - ladders may be needed to reach the upper portion with your sponge mop. "Mop" the wall liberally, but not sloppily - working on a 4' X 10' section at a time has worked well for us.
3. Wait 10 minutes or so - find something useful to do, but not distracting! Like, lay out newspapers for the next section - or if the wallpaper has been in place a long time, upon waiting 10 min., you can also remop the wall.
4. Once the paper has begun to loosen, Get up on the ladder with your scraper & begin to lightly scrape the paper off - usually, it comes off readily & in huge chunks. Sometimes it doesn't, though -
5. But as long as the wallpaper is wet & malleable, work at it a while, and have your scrubby sponge handy to help it along;
6. If the wallpaper is not coming loose, remop the wall with fresh hot water,and take a 10-min. break - and
7. Try again. If it's still not coming loose, remop it & move to the next section, letting this wall soak a while.
8. In a perfect world, this method works great in short order. It has for me on well over 2 dozen rooms in my lifetime. Once the wallpaper is OFF, mop it down once or twice with CLEAN/FRESH hot water.
9. Believe it or not, this method works, and is comparatively cheap. And it's thorough. But it IS time-consuming. But then, so is the expensive method.

Tips

• If you come to a spot that does not come off with water alone, use a 50% vinegar solution, still warm or hot. It will smell up the room, but works wonders for dissolving the toughened, old glues. Unlike drywall, you don't have to worry about saturating the wall, so soak down difficult spots several times with the vinegar solution and come back to it in a few minutes or hours.
• Remove furniture, drapes, etc., from the immediate area, as this IS a sloppy, messy task. Rewet the mop in the hot water often. Replace the water with HOT as often as needed. It's the hot water that loosens the old paste. Sometimes there are 3+ layers of wallpaper underneath, and back in the 20's, they used a wonderful glue based on eggwhites or something, and THAT layer is tough to remove - so soak, scrape & rub with a scrubby sponge repeatedly, as needed. Before you apply the new wallcovering of your choice, VACUUM well! There will be scraps of your old wallpaper showing up in the rugs for years, if you don't. If you live in an old or historic house, save any largish scraps of wallpaper for your 'Old House Scrapbook'!

Warnings

• Many of the older wallpapers contained arsenic, as well as questionable items in the paste - do NOT let your kids or pets partake of the rinse water or wallpaper scraps!

Things You'll Need

• Old spongemop(s), newspapers/tarp, etc., scrubby sponges, wallpaper scraper or putty knife, ladder, buckets of HOT water, time, patience

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