We bought our current house at the end of last year. It was built in 1960, but the previous owners have kept it in great condition and have done a lot of great upgrades already (screened in pourch, updated appliances, reinforced supports, etc), but there are a lot of upgrades we are planning to make.

Some stuff we will/have hired pros for (solar panel install, replacing all of the outlets to be 3 prong instead of 2 prong) and some stuff that we want to tackle on our own. One of those being this random textured wallpaper on only one side of the wall. Pretty soon after we moved in the cats started using it as a scratching post (despite having HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS worth of scratching posts and toys in their own special cat room).

This has kind of moved up the timeline for removing the textured wallpaper and repainting. I started to pick and pull at it a little bit to see how easily it would come up/what was under it. It seems like maybe paper covered drywall underneath? The wallpaper comes up real easily, the brown spots are part of the wallpaper. You can get a fingernail under it and start pulling it up with the rest of the wallpaper.

But the white part underneath is fuzzy. Do we need to just replace the fuzzy drywall or is there a primer we can put on it that will smooth it out?