If you’re looking at houses, with the intent to buy one, I want to give you some advice that will save you many many hours of hard work. If the house has wallpaper, don’t buy it unless you really like the wallpaper (I don’t know why you would, wallpaper sucks.) If you really like the house, and are willing to look past the wallpaper, work it into the purchase agreement that either the seller has to remove the wallpaper or the sale price will be reduced by the amount of money that it will cost to hire someone to remove the wallpaper.
My wife bought our house in October of 2003, about three months before we met. The night I met her, she was removing vinyl wall covering (wallpaper). Our house is a split level, and the entry, living room, dining room, stairway to the basement, and stair and hallway to the bedroom level all had the same wallpaper on them. This weekend, after over a year and a half of working when we have had time, we finally put the final touches of paint on in the entryway, to finish that long and frustrating project.
Last summer, she hired someone to remove the wallpaper in the family room and kitchen, at a cost of over $800. Note, they didn’t paint. They didn’t even patch the holes they made. They only removed the wallpaper and paste. We then had to patch, prime, and put two coats of paint on.
We removed wallpaper, and painted in the main room and hallway in the basement last winter. We were fortunate enough that everything came off fairly easily down there, and did that whole area in a few weeks.
We are now working on our master bedroom and bathroom. The previous owner, who only lived there for a year, removed the paper in the bedroom, but didn’t bother removing the backing and paste. He painted over that. We sanded the rough texture off and tried painting over that. It started bubbling and peeling off when we got about 1/3 of the way done with the first coat. We have spent a few weekends peeling off the paint from the walls, inch by inch, with a putty knife. We are almost done, having only a few really small areas left to get the paint off (like in the corners where there is a door and trim). We have taken 1/3 – 1/2 of the wallpaper backing off, and will have more than the usual amount of patching to do.
Once we’re done with the master bedroom, we have one bedroom that we are 90% sure we can just paint, another that we are unsure of (it may turn out like the master – which means we’d have to peel inch by inch), a small mud room that needs to have wallpaper backing and paste removed, a basement bathroom that needs wallpaper removed and paint but probably won’t take very long to do, and a bedroom (soon to be office) in the basement that can be just painted.
If we had only needed to paint, and there would have been no wallpaper to remove, we could have done it in 4-8 weekends. As it stands right now, we have been working on it off and on for over a year and a half. There have been many weekends when we haven’t been able to do anything, especially right after our wedding, but the work has been laborious and frustrating.
When my wife hired someone to remove the wallpaper in the family room and kitchen, she got a quote for the whole house and it would have cost over $10,000 just to have the paper removed. Again, we would have had to patch, prime, and paint ourselves. Our house is around 2500 square feet.
And so the advice. Removing wallpaper is a lot of hard work. It takes a day long painting job and turns it into, in some cases, over a week of work. Save yourself tons of frustration. Work with the seller to get that work done or paid for for you. I would never buy a house with wallpaper again without getting that stipulation in the purchase agreement.
Wallpaper is some nasty stuff!