Using Hot Water To Strip Wallpaper: a house log

Send out the ravens! (yes, that is a Game of Thrones reference). Wallpaper stripping has commenced.

I was in fact truly excited to tackle the half bathroom’s wallpaper removal project, because I am a strange breed of human and that is my idea of a good time. And since we have five rooms full of wallpaper (the foyer, the half bathroom, the kitchen, the dining room, and our bathroom), I chose that I would try a distinct removal method for each one and report back with the pros/cons about each approach as I went, all in the hopes of sussing out which ones bite the big one and which ones seem to work the best. I am telling you folks, I am like one of those people who works in “risk management” and gets their kicks watching paint dry. So hold onto your hats, it is about to get crazy up in here.

My first step was to clear things out (the soap pump, mirror above the sink, toilet paper, etc). Simply so I do not have any accessories in the way of the serious peelage that I was about to dive into.

Then I took out the wall plates to free up some edges of the paper and hopefully make the removal process easier (there are two light switches and an outlet). I could not assist but marvel at the dedication that was once put into this wallpaper job – the outlets were papered and the flowers even matched up.

Next I boiled a pot of water on the stove, since the method I am trying this time is intensely plain, but I have also heard that it works like gangbusters. Get ready for my method folks. Here it comes. Oh my gosh, it is…. boiling water sprayed on the wall. That is it. No scoring, no steamer, no spackle knife, no application with a weed sprayer, no fabric softener. While I have also heard excellent things about those methods, the plain boiling water applied with a spray bottle approach seemed like a good place to start. If it stunk, it was the smallest room (and if it straight up did not work I could abandon that method and move onto something else).

And speaking of moving onto something else, this approach nearly went off the rails immediately? Why? Well, I had this vat of boiling water on the stove and I was holding my spray bottle thinking “how am I going to fill this without dripping hot water all over myself?” – seriously I stood there a solid minute wondering how I was going to avoid giving myself third degree burns filling the bottle. I stared at my ladle and thought “no way, that is going to drip out all over my hands” and then at last slipped the empty capless spray bottle itself into the boiling water and used the ladle to hold it under the water. I heard that comforting glug-glug-glug sound as it filled itself up, which was music to my apparently burn-a-phobic mind. Then I used the same ladle that I had used to submerge it so it would fill itself up to fish out the bottle without touching the boiling water itself.

I used one of those silicone pot holder things to hold the bottle as it came out and then attempted to secure the top of the spray bottle and that is when I realized – DUH! – that the bottle had warped from the boiling water…

Folks, what was I thinking? I have no idea. I blame it on wallpaper-stripping-excitement. I was as wired as a kid hopped up on four boxes of Nerds. But I realized that the spray bottle still sprayed even without a perfectly shaped bottom or a perfectly attached nozzle, and in a quite “the show must go on” moment I walked into the bathroom and simply began spraying. Worked simply fine.

What I learned:

• Spraying the whole room with boiling water and then attempting to peel the paper is a lot less effective than saturating small sections at a time (ex: half of one wall) and then peeling while the paper is still wet and loose. When I attempted to spray the whole room first (even a small room like a bathroom) by the time I got back to the first part I sprayed it was starting to dry and re-attaching itself to the wall. It came off much easier when I moved in smaller sections.

• Constantly spraying that bottle does get a little old (your wrist/forearm gets a little Jillian Michaels-ish workout) but it was not bad sufficient that I cried or anything. I have heard that filling one of those plastic weed-spray containers from Home Depot gives your arm a large break, so that might be helpful in a larger room, but I had such little wiggle room in the bathroom (there was a chair in there with me sometimes so I could reach a few high parts) that a big gallon sprayer would have cramped the room even more.

• I needed to use a silicone pot holder to hold the bottle the whole time I was spraying since the bottle itself was still truly hot, but the especially hot water truly seemed to get the paper off the wall well, so it was worth it to bring the heat, so to speak.

• Nearly all of the front of the wallpaper came off in the first round of spraying and peeling, which took about 1.5 hours. Then I re-sprayed the whole wall again since the backing/glue was still there in most places, and that came off in a second round of peeling, which took about 1.5 hours. So all told, it was about a three hour project from start to finish.

But when I was done I had a garbage bag full of wallpaper and white walls!

Glorious, glorious, de-flowered white walls.

Which was certainly a welcome sight after seeing this for the last few weeks…

And now I can make loud proclamations, like “hear ye, hear ye, my house has four distinct types of wallpaper instead of five!” Not that I am anti-wallpaper (I in fact linked to a few options in this post that I’d enjoy to see in here someday). Oh and I saved a small flowery wallpaper remnant from my removal process because I think it would be lively to frame little squares of each one of them somewhere – simply for the memories. So… one room (and one wallpaper method removal) down, four to go…

Psst- OK, who is watching Whodunnit? We saw the first episode last night and we are hooked.