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Painting Wallpaper – Yes You Can, But Why Would You?
Painting wallpaper is a last resort in my book. The reason I say this is that my wife and I can strip a room in a day and clean all the glue off the walls and it’s ready for painting the very next day. And we do it all without any tools other than a small occasional scraper blade! No paper tigers, no steam machines. Just a spray bottle filled with water, a scrub pad and a couple of terry cloth towels. O.K. when is it all right to paint over wallpaper then? The answer to that is when some yo-yo decides to cut corners in new construction and never primes or paints the drywall. Instead they just size the walls and paper them. The result? You have permanent wallpapered walls. You see, without a paint or primer barrier you cannot keep the wall wet long enough to get the wallpaper off. The drywall keeps sucking up the water and the drywall starts turning into mud. This makes a real mess of the wall. In this case I will paint over wallpaper. It’s the last resort. The good news is that so far I have only run into this problem once. Most of the time wallpaper comes off fairly easy but there is some cases where it’s harder, but not impossible. Only in this one rare case, then I say paint it up.
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