I have an old house from 1780. We bought it last year. Every room is wallpapered. We removed the paper in the kitchen and one bathroom. These rooms had sort of a semi-gloss paint under wallpaper and it wasn't that hard to remove the paper. Now I started in the upstairs hallway and boy that paper is stuck but good. Raw plaster (horsehair) underneath. So I call in the pros who had given me a $300 estimate to remove the paper in both of the hallways and up the stairs. Well after working on just one long wall, they say that it will cost about $3000 since the paper is so well-adhered. So I say stop stripping the paper and what are my options. They suggest sealing the paper and painting over it. I said fine, I can do that. So I tested some primer on it and nary a bubble appeared. So my solution is to just paint over it. Not my preference, but definitely easier on my wallet!

I removed the wallpaper from an entire house of similar age and style, although on a smaller scale. Other than one small storage space and bedroom closets, every wall in the house was unpainted plaster under the wallpaper. I had one guy who did the quality of work I wanted at a reasonable price and I kept him occupied for many months, now going on 12 years of personal and business projects. When you own a beautiful vintage home, it is important to find someone who will honor the quality and craftsmanship and be happy to have the opportunity to work on your house. Owning a beautiful vintage home is a lifestyle choice and I was willing to spend the money and devote the hours required for many years. It is expensive to do the work right and cheap fixes cause more problems and cost more money in the long run. There are many competent painters out there but many of them are focused on the profit side and historic house projects are more difficult to predict and manage. I would be looking for a small company where the owner runs the jobs himself and stay away from companies with multiple crews doing different projects. Rarely does the attention to detail extend equally to every member of a large crew and I want the boss on site. In my house, only the ceilings were canvassed. We ended up removing the canvas in a couple rooms because once the canvas is torn, it is quite common for the problem to spread. We were able to repair one portion of the living room ceiling but it was not guaranteed to work. That room was about 350 sq ft and I was willing to take the chance rather than pay more to remove to bare plaster and skim coat. I did a good portion of the wallpaper removal myself, working with the painter on a time and materials basis. He was not comfortable giving me a bid for that part of the work because wallpaper removal is just too variable. One benefit of plaster walls is the surface is more forgiving than drywall. If you are relatively handy and healthy enough for the work, it is not difficult, just time consuming and boring. Turn up the music, protect the floors and woodwork and just get busy. I was very fortunate that only the crown molding in the foyer, main floor hallway and back hallway had been painted. We stripped that paint and it was a good decision despite the amount of work involved. It is expensive, but done right, it will never need to be done again.

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?

I found Keri quickly on Instagram. If you’re on IG I‘d message her or comment on her posts about the show and she if she or someone else responds. She has several photos with tagged accounts of people and companies involved in the set design as well.