I’m a self proclaimed expert at stripping wallpaper. We bought our current house because of its potential, it certainly had nothing to do with nine rooms of hideous wallpaper that all needed to be stripped. When I was preparing to strip the paper I went online and looked for the easiest way to do it. Everything I read pointed to the scorer and stripping gel that you can buy from local hardware stores. I managed one wall with that in three hours so I considered that a $35 lesson learned and a big fail. The next method I used was dawn and hot water in a spray bottle, this method took three hours as well. It was time consuming and extremely messy so another big fail. I would have tried a steamer but we have wallpapered ceilings in some rooms that look really nice and we wanted to keep so steaming was out of the question.

I finally devised my own method that is both cheap and easy. The only tools required are a large paint brush, a bucket and hot water. I boiled water, poured it into my bucket, painted the hot water on over the wallpaper with the paint brush, let it sit for a minute and peeled the paper off. Depending on the paper you can sometimes get lucky and get both layers off in one go. If the backing stays on the wall just paint over it with more hot water and peel or scrape the second layer off. On sheet rock walls it really can be that easy! Don’t make my mistake and fall victim to all the expensive “miracle” products.

Here is a small sampling of the eclectic mix of wallpaper that was in this house when we bought it. I’m sure most of you agree that this wallpaper was well past its use by date and had to go.