You may have hung wallpaper in your home years ago and maybe it's gotten dated and you want to change it. More importantly you may have purchased a home where the previous owner's hung some wallpaper and, quite frankly, their taste may not be yours and you want to change it. There's a right way and a wrong way to remove that wallpaper before you get ready to paint or hang some more.

This is an example of the wrong way to do it. Just grabbing a loose corner and staring to pull it is not the way to pull this stuff off.

The problem we have is that most wallpaper we use these days is vinyl covered. It's vinyl on the front but it still has a paper backing. When you reach to grab a corner and pull, you're only pulling the vinyl off the front, leaving the paper on the wall - and that's a mess.

To really make this job easy, we need to use a stripper. But the problem is that the vinyl face on this paper doesn't want to let moisture through. So we use a product like this. This is a Paper Tiger with little, sharp wheels. You put this up on the wall. You run it around. It actually perforates the surface of the vinyl to allow the stripper to get back through there and dissolve the adhesive. It's important to use a gel stripper. This is a vertical surface. We need it to hang on that wall for a half an hour and then it's going to be real easy to strip off.

Now if you've made this mistake, just spray the stripper on the paper backing. It will scrape off in 30 minutes.
Don says once the wallpaper is removed, for best results, prepare the wall surface with wall covering primer-sealer. Not only does is make it easier to hang new paper, it will be easier to remove down the road.
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