I just recently painted a woman's kitchen over wallpaper. The wallpaper was in good shape, firmly stuck, and needed no repairs. I believe I ended up with two coats of primer because it had blue flowers that showed through the first coat. Two coats of paint, and it looked really good. I talked to a painter first, and he said it would be fine, just look and make sure there were no loose spots, or anywhere that the paper overlapped or would cause a visible flaw in the paint. These need to be fixed with sheetrock mud. I also had read somewhere not to use water based primer as it would react with the wallpaper paste. But oil primer smells awful, and the occupants were worried about odors. The painter guy said he had never heard that, and water based primer would be fine. It was.

Good luck with your project!

Some---most?---wallpaper paste is water based and will absorb water from latex primer and the paper will come loose. This won't happen with vinyl wallcoverings and may not happen with every cellulose paste but it CAN happen.

Did you try a steamer? It's the fastest way to remove wallpaper though many people seem to think it is too much work or too expensive to use, or something.

If you saturate cellulose paste, it and the paper will come off easily. Many people make the mistake of scrubbing and scraping before the paste is saturated, which leadings to scratches and gouges in the wall surface.

Saturation with a steamer takes about 30 seconds. Saturation via spraying and sponging can take a half hour or more. I've done it both ways and now I always try steaming first.

we just painted our daughters room last week. the wallpaper was stuck good in most places, and my father in law recommended leaving it. he was a professional painter up until 5 years ago and after looking it over good he said to leave it in place.

what we did was first remove any and all paper that was loose/coming up at the edges. then we mudded all seams/bad spots/areas we removed paper with joint compound. next we sanded these areas after they dried. then a light mudding to float out the walls.

after the next round of sanding, we primed. as pointed out earlier, the glue does soak up the moisture from teh latex paint. this caused a couple bubbles to raise up. the larger ones we ripped, then pulled back the paper in the area and re mudded. smaller ones laid back down as they dried. once we were thru with the sanding again, we put a second coat of primer on. then just paint as usual.

any bubles that come up later, and they will, pierce them with a hypodermic needle and inject super glue. then mash the buble back down. make sure you do not put so much glue in that it oozes back out, and do not get you hand stuck to the wall or the section will rip!

after doing this project, i truely believe it would have been quicker, longer lasting to strip and paint. if it ever does peel, i will have to mud the area and repaint again.

The name of the products escape me, however there are primers and paint out there that are made especially for painting over wall paper.

Check with wall paper companies, hardware stores and paint companies and see if you can find the stuff. It might be worth it.

Good luck!

SG

WE had some very resistant wallpaper that would not budge off the walls, so we primed it with a oil based primer (we used killz) then used joint compound to sort of retexture the wall so that the new paint would bind to that. It seems to have worked very well.

People can and do paint over wallpaper. I spent an entire summer stripping 100 years of layers of painted wallpaper off the walls of my tiny kitchen in order to get down to a nice plaster surface. It would be an understatement to say that I did not have kind thoughts toward those who had painted over paper.

yogacat has echoed my experience minus 40 years. I had to do a bedroom, living and dining room and I had VERY evil thoughts!

I would not paint over wallpaper if it can be avoided in any way. if its been painted over before and isn't peeling off and looks ok then I would go aheah if I wasn't planning to live in the house for 10 or 20 more years.

I have been removing walpapers to paint plaster walls. I have tried a few ways 1 was vingar and hot water that didn't work too well. 2 was hot water and fabric softener. that worked better. 3 was a comercial paste stripper you mix with hot water and sponge on the wall like the others and I had perforated the paper before trying any of these things. The commercial brand stripper didn't work much better than fabric softener either. last and final method was to get a steamer. I looked at renting one but at 30 bucks a day that was too much for all I have to do in the future to keep re-renting. so I bought a wagner power steamer at lowes for $50.00 the steamer is designed to remove the paper and it did loosen it up enough for me to pull and scrape it off very easy with very little damage at all to the walls. I would say use steam it is the fastest savest way to get walpaper off. I recomend using a perforating tool first so that the steam can get in and work faster. my one room had a coated paper and it came off vinyl and some of the pader first then I steamed it some more and the remaing came right off.

if you have plaster no mater what there will be very small cracks that neeed attention and with any wall type you will have nail holes to mud up.