Apparently they now make something you can paint on old wallpaper so you can lay down new wallpaper. I love WP. But only in certain ways. I like accent walls with WP, bathrooms with WP, and a nice romantic bedroom with wallpaper on all four walls, like they did it in the Victorian era. But it has to be done just right. Back in the 80s we wallpapered everything! lol. No more!

faron79, I was using a 50-(1) grit aluminum oxide paper; that is the one that cannot begin to bite into the paint. Are you telling me that a finer grit might succeed where the coarse grit failed, or am I using the wrong compound? I looked at the primer that we have on hand. My memory had been that it was one of the Zinsser flavors, but now I see that it is Pittsburgh Paint Sealgrip 100% Acrylic, and it purports to be a Universal primer/sealer. I take it that you think we would be penny-wise and pound foolish to use the stuff on-hand rather than Zinsser Shieldz, is that correct? Here is a link that might be useful: Description of Sealgrip

Hi all, Thanks for your advice. It is a concrete wall covered with plaster. Before I painted the wall with latex the wall surface was quite smooth except looking a little bid old and slighly chalky. I painted with several layers of latex on it. The new wall looked beautiful with shining surface but lasting about 14 months. Then the latex starts cracking, flaking and peeling. If I peel off the latex layer a smooth old wall will come back. The summer is hot and humid here. AC and humidifier are on when I'm at home but not running round the clock. I'm prepared to remove all loose latex and sand the wall thoroughly. Afterward I'll coat the wall with; Gardz http://www.zinsserdirect.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=96 OR Peelstop http://www.zinsserdirect.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=1_4&products_id=26 for hanging wallpaper. My second thought is whether I need to hang lining paper. The wall is quite smooth. After finish I expect the wall can last for great number of years. Advice would be appreciated. Besides which sealer will be more suitable for my application, Gardz OR Peelstop. Thanks in advance. B.R. satimis

If I don’t wish to remove the current multiple layers of wallpaper on my plaster walls would using paintable wallpaper over them make it any easier to remove later than simply painting over them? There are parts of the old paper that would need repaired before we could do either. If you want to know the why to this question read on, its long, but I have very strong feelings about why I don’t wish to try to remove this paper. The full situation: We’ve been slowly remodeling our early 20th century house. Most of the walls are plaster except for the back half of our upstairs which was added later and is wood paneling. Every inch of the house is covered in wallpaper. The original plan was to eventually drywall the paneled rooms upstairs and to remove the wallpaper to the original plaster downstairs. Re-doing walls however is much further down our current to-do list so in the interim I’ve painted over the wallpapered-paneled bedroom walls. I’ve learned from this that if the wall and paper is in good shape you can barely tell there is even wallpaper under it, but if they are not every imperfection will show. Here is the before and after of my daughter’s room. Even knowing it’s painted wallpapered I always have to look very hard to find the seams. In our bedroom however I see the creases in the paper the minute I walk in (it’s still a 1000x better than the old wallpaper was!) I have also now experienced removing wallpaper from old plaster walls and I don’t wish to go through it again. We removed the wallpaper from my son’s bedroom in the old part of the house. The paper removal was itself was fine, but the walls were in terrible condition and covered in lead paint. Dealing with these issues took about 10 weeks. Those walls are beautiful now, but I am in no hurry to repeat the disruption and stress this caused. I am now considering what I want to do with the walls in our main living space downstairs. These have many, many layers of wallpaper on them. We saw evidence of this when taking down some crown trim and from some “helpful” wallpaper removal by our 6 month old pup. We’ve been dealing with the wallpaper, most of which, while dated is at least somewhat neutral in tone. However, we are talking about removing a fake beam in order to be able to place our TV on that wall and the current wallpaper only goes up to it. My husband has talked of putting drywall over the plaster. This not only seems weird to me but problematic in that much of our original trim would likely be damaged in the effort and we would never be able to match it exactly. At this point I feel like our best option would be either to paint the current wallpaper, or to put paintable wallpaper over it and paint that. Would it likely be easier to remove paintable wallpaper in order to restore the walls at some point if that is what is wanted or would it equally hard? I’m almost considering this more for someone who comes after us because frankly the only way I foresee us re-doing these walls the “correct” way would be if we had enough money after my children grow up and leave home to have a professional come in and do them all at once. Honestly, that seems unlikely to me, we’re older, with young kids trying to save for retirement, and college and remodel this house. We’ll be lucky to have enough for retirement and I don’t know that I’d want to stay in such a large house when the children are gone anyway. I know nothing about hanging wallpaper, but I do know how to paint it, so I think that would “easier” for me, and I also can’t imagine texture on every wall, I’d really have to find something super subtle. Anyway, I’m simply not up for removing the paper and dealing with what’s underneath, so what’s the next best thing?