Send out the ravens! (Yes, that’s a Game of Thrones reference.) Wallpaper stripping is officially underway.
I was actually excited to tackle the half bathroom’s wallpaper removal. Strange hobby, I know, but I enjoy projects like this. We have wallpaper in five rooms—the foyer, the half bath, the kitchen, the dining room, and the main bathroom—so I decided to try a different removal method in each room and report the pros and cons. Think of it as testing different approaches to see what works best. I’m a little bit of a detail person, and watching wallpaper come off felt oddly satisfying.
First step: clear the counters and remove small items—soap pump, mirror, toilet paper—so nothing interfered with the peeling process.
I also removed the wall plates to free up the edges of the paper and make removal easier—there were two light switches and an outlet. I couldn’t help but admire the original installer’s dedication: the wallpaper even covered the outlets and the pattern matched across seams.
For this room I tried a very simple method I’d heard good things about: boiling water applied with a spray bottle. No scoring, no steamer, no special tools—just very hot water sprayed directly onto the paper. If it failed, at least it was a small space and I could switch methods without too much trouble.
That said, the plan nearly derailed immediately. I had a pot of boiling water on the stove and was wondering how to fill the spray bottle without burning myself. After debating with a ladle and a fear of dripping hot water, I set the empty, capless spray bottle into the pot and used the ladle to fill it. The bottle filled with a satisfying glug and I used the ladle to fish it out. I used a silicone pot holder to handle the hot bottle and tried to screw the top back on—only to discover the bottle had warped from the heat.
Yes, the spray bottle was misshapen, but it still functioned well enough. Determined, I went into the bathroom and started spraying the paper with the boiling water solution. It worked.
Key takeaways from this method:
- Saturating small sections at a time works far better than spraying the entire room and returning later. When I sprayed the whole bathroom, the parts I sprayed first started to dry and re-adhered to the wall. Working in manageable sections—about half a wall—let me peel the paper while it was still wet and loose.
- Continuously spraying with a small bottle gets tiring on your wrist and forearm. For larger rooms, a handheld pump sprayer (like the plastic yard sprayers from hardware stores) would save effort, but in this tiny bathroom there wasn’t room for a large sprayer to maneuver.
- The bottle remained hot to the touch, so a silicone pot holder or thick glove is useful. The very hot water made the glue release effectively, so the effort was worth it.
- The front layer of wallpaper came off in the first round of spraying and peeling, which took about 1.5 hours. A second round of spraying removed most of the backing and adhesive and took another 1.5 hours. Total time: roughly three hours from start to finish.
When the job was finished I had a trash bag full of wallpaper and clean white walls.
Glorious, clean, de-flowered white walls.
Definitely a welcome change after living with floral wallpaper for weeks.
Now I can proclaim loudly that my house has four different types of wallpaper instead of five. I’m not anti-wallpaper—I actually like some designs and saved a small remnant of the floral paper to frame as a keepsake of the house’s history. One room and one removal method down, four rooms and four more methods to test.
P.S. Who’s watching Whodunnit? We saw the first episode last night and are hooked.