pre 1970 home means your in for a mess, if that is when the wallpaper was installed. good news is you dont know when it was LOL here is what to expect. anything!!! one job will peal off the walls no problem, the next one will require the removing all of the drywall and starting over. pre 1970 drywall is a gamble of its own, any moisture on some of it will create blisters (paper coming loose from the gypsum) so just the moisture from the solutions to remove wallpaper is enough to destroy old drywall in some cases, depending on if it was primed, or even painted before wallpaper. also keep in mind that much of the old drywall had asbestos in it/ and many paints before 1978 had lead in them. so any work done to an old house needs to be done carefully. many contractors dont care about the particles that are left in your home for you to deal with. so when you are looking at estimates, you need to think about the knowledge of contractor, as well as the additional costs that a good one will incure, including test kits for your older home project, and the possible need for air scrubbers, suits, and masks.

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.

We had the same situation in two bathrooms in the house we bought 2 years ago (what were they thinking!?!). We were able to use a scraper/putty knife to get under the "mudd" and pull it away from the wallpapered wall being careful not to gouge the drywall underneath. Then we used a water/steam method to remove the wallpaper. A little time intensive but actually not as awful as we expected. Good luck!

Good luck tying to get that grass cloth off, especially if there was not a real good coat of paint under it before it was hung! The problem is that you have a very thick wallpaper with several coats of paint on it. To remove any wallpaper, you have to get water to the paste that is holding it on the wall. That thick coat of paint is going to fight water penetration. I normally dislike the "Paper Tiger" device which punctures the wall paper with thousands of little holes, but in this case, it may be your only hope of getting the water down to the paste. Don't spray down more than one wall at a time with water. This is going to be a slow, tedious project. Finish removing one wall before wetting down the next. You will undoubtedly damage the drywall, so be prepared to do extensive patching of the ripped and gouged drywall. As to new textured wallcovering: As PaintGuy states, there are heavily textured wallcoverings on the market that are designed to be painted overright from the start. These papers are mainly out of Europe. It is known as "Raufazur' in Germany, where the home improvement stores have aisles of the stuff. There are also commercial grade heavy vinyl wallcoverings with grasscloth textures embossed on them. These come in colors and can also be painted over. You will need to go to a paint store that still maintains a library of wallcovering books. These are fewer and fewer as wallpaper as become much less popular in later years. I do like the looks of painted wallcovering. If you ever have the opportunity to visit The Chicago Art Institute, you will notice that the walls upon which these grand old paintings hang, is painted grasscloth or heavy burlap like texture. One other thought: heavy textured wallcoverings often look very interesting when a faux glaze is rubbed over them. The glaze gets stuck in all the texture when the surface is wiped with rags, giving a very different look than the plain painted surface.