Wallpaper Removal Services Call 0423688352  99200319 Sydney

We use the state-of-the-art steam pressure systems made in Australia by Simister Manufacturing (Australia) Pty Ltd can achieve in minutes what would take hours if not days to finish by hand. Even the most difficult wall-coverings can be stripped with ease.

Wallpaper removal is a difficult area to estimate properly because so many factors that influence the successful completion of the job are unseen and can't be observed until work is begun. For this reason, when we quote a price for wallpaper removal, the following factors are used to establish the estimated cost.

• We assume that 1 layer of paper is to be removed.
• We assume that the surface was properly prepared with a sealer before the wall covering was applied. This means that the paper or wall covering will release relatively cleanly from the surface.
• We assume that standard wallpaper glues were used, and no especially difficult or troublesome glues or adhesives were used to apply the wallpaper.
• We assume that some scarring will occur in the removal process, but no excessive damage will be done in removing the wallpaper. (In other words, the majority of the wall surface will be intact, with no large gouges or holes caused by extremely tight adhesion, improper surface preparation or a deteriorated wall surface.)

If we get into the project and find additional layers of paper, extremely durable glues, sloppy surface preparation (like wallpaper glued onto bare drywall or plaster) or a deteriorated wall surface, additional charges may apply. The charges will only increase if it makes the job more difficult. (For example, if there are two layers of paper, but they are bonded tightly together and come off easily, you would likely see no increase in cost.) 

If the wallpaper removal portion of a project is much more difficult than anticipated, your estimator will let you know and try to give you an estimate on any change in cost. After the wallpaper is removed, we will make the surface ready either to be painted or to have a new wall covering applied. Our painting crews do not do wall-sizing, and that is left to the paper hanger if needed.

Wallpaper is a thing of the past, and many Business owners do not care for the previous building owner's taste in wallpaper, and would rather have it removed and painted to the colour of there choice.

That is why we offer our complete wallpaper removal service, before painting the interior of your office or commercial building.

From removing the wallpaper as well as the chemical glue underneath, you are ensured that we will make your walls look beautiful again.

Wallpaper removal is easy. Well, maybe it's not really easy, but I have good news for you. Yes, stripping wallpaper is messy and it is time consuming. You would rather do almost anything else. As a professional, my clients have often told me that if not for the wallpaper removal, they would have decorated the room themselves. It is such a deterrent.

Types of Wallpaper

This is important information because you want to choose the wallpaper that works best for its intended area. For instance, wallpaper that works best in the bathroom might not be the best candidate for the dining room. Read on for a sampling of wallpaper types.

Vinyl coated paper �- As its name indicates, this wallpaper has been treated with acrylic vinyl or polyvinyl chloride. These wallpapers are easy to clean and unaffected by long-term exposure to humidity or grease.

Coated fabric �- This type of wallpaper has an underlying layer of fabric also coated with a liquid form of vinyl. This is not a good candidate for humid rooms such as bathrooms or walls that will be exposed to grease.

Paper backed vinyl or solid sheet vinyl �- This type of wallpaper has a layer of paper or pulp backed to a decorative vinyl surface. Because of its vinyl surface, this is another good candidate for high humidity areas. In fact, this type of wallpaper is good for almost any climate.

Fabric backed vinyl �- This wallpaper consists of a layer of fabric laminated to a layer of solid vinyl. There are two types of wallpaper included in this category. Solid vinyl is simply a layer of paper or fabric laminated to vinyl film.

While it is a hassle to remove, most people's real fears centre around damaging the wall while stripping the paper. It's true. You can. I've spent as much time repairing that damage. There is no reason that it has to happen, though. Once you understand what is really happening below the surface, wallpaper removal becomes quite simple. Let me talk you through it.

First, KNOW that this is going to be a messy job. There is no way around that. Bits and pieces of wet paper, covered in adhesive, will end up stuck to everything that's not covered. Fortunately, it cleans up easily with some soap and water.

We can minimize the extent of the mess, though, by taking the time to place an inexpensive plastic drop cloth over the furniture. Lay a rubber backed runner along the wall. Remove everything hanging on the wall and make sure that the furniture has been moved back from the wall by at least three feet.

Okay, now that we have prepped our work area, what's next? We need to discover what "group" we're in. To do this, start by finding an edge and attempt to peel the paper off. Here's where we either sink or swim. Some of the heavy vinyl and fabric wall coverings will just peel right off.

Others will split, leaving a layer of plain paper on the wall. What happens then is that when you try to tear off that layer, it comes off in small pieces. A lot of specialty papers and papers that have been painted over fall into this group. There is a third group that we'll talk about in a few minutes.

If your wallpaper is in the first group, the wall coverings that just peel right off, enjoy the rest of your day. You got lucky. There are different strategies we can use for the other two groups that will save you both time and money.

Now, for the other 99% of us, there are a number of different products on the market that we could use to remove the wallpaper. I have tried them all. Save your money. All we really need is warm water.

Start by peeling off that top layer of paper. What's left on the wall will be a layer of plain paper and adhesive. Apply the water to the paper with a sponge, squirt bottle, garden sprayer or whatever you have handy that will accomplish the job. Use just enough to saturate the paper without water running down the wall and making a mess.

Now for the really big secret to wallpaper removal: WAIT. That's right, wait. Moisten the area again and wait some more. It normally takes about 20 to 30 minutes for the saturated paper to completely soften the adhesive beneath.

Next, use a 6" broad knife to remove the paper from the wall. It should come off easily and in long strips. If it does not, remoisten the paper and wait a few more minutes. Let the water do all the hard work! By wetting the wall ahead of where you are working, it is possible to move steadily around the room once you get started.

Now, about that last group. You've watered and waited and watered and waited. Frankly, this just isn't working and you're becoming impatient. The problem is getting enough water to penetrate the surface and completely saturate the core of the wallpaper. There is a solution. We need to break up the water resistant surface coating of the wallpaper without harming the wall.

Now you might be tempted to start gouging at the wallpaper or scraping it roughly. This is not a good idea. This is how you damage the wall. Then you have to spend more money because you have to call a contractor. You are also on his time schedule now.

There are special tools made should you run into this problem. I normally use a 36 grit sanding disc to abrade the surface by hand. NOTE: Using a disc this coarse with a power tool will destroy your wall. Make sure to use it manually only!

Rent a commercial wallpaper steamer. Steam passes through the perforations made by the sanding disc. It is absorbed by the paper and adhesive much quicker than water. Make repeated passes over an area with the steamer until the core of the paper becomes saturated and the adhesive softens. If an area is being particularly stubborn, try going over it again with the 36 grit disc to allow additional steam to penetrate the paper.

Don't waste your time scraping at areas where the adhesive has not yet softened. I cannot stress enough that this is how walls get damaged. Steam the paper until the adhesive softens. Remove the paper with your 6" broad knife. You should see good results with the steamer.

So wallpaper removal is not always easy, but nobody said that it has to be a painful experience either. Have a wallpaper removal party and invite all your friends. Treat them to dinner afterwards and make it a girls' day. Or how about a contest with the kids. Always keep a picture in your mind (or on the fridge) of how beautiful the job will turn out. Be proud! Life is too short, so don't sweat the small stuff. Now, let's get going!

Wallpaper removal is fairly easy, but quite messy. There are two ways to remove it, aside from ripping it off the walls with your bare hands. Don't laugh... I have seen wallpaper that would fall from the walls with a sideways glance. However, if yours was that easy, you would be practicing an icy stare instead of e-mailing me!

All kidding aside (never), if you can get under a corner of the paper, try to tear it off dry. If it works, it will save you loads of work. In some cases, everything but a small amount of paste residue will remain. You can clean it off with some wallpaper stripper and a sponge. In other cases, the facing (on vinyl papers, primarily) will come off and leave a paper backing stuck on the wall. This backing will be easy to get off with method 2.

METHOD 1: The first method is using a wallpaper steamer, a piece of equipment that can be rented. It sends steam through a hose to a flat metal plate similar to an iron. Pressing this plate on the wall forces steam into the wallpaper, which softens the paper and paste.  This allows you to strip the paper with a wide putty knife.

This method harkens to the days of plaster walls, still in abundance in older homes but a relative rarity in the last twenty or thirty years. Unfortunately, aggressive steaming  can damage paper-faced wallboards, especially if the wallboard wasn't fully sealed prior to wallpapering. In new construction, walls that are going to be papered are often not primed with paint, but just coated with sizing.   The sizing seals enough to allow the wallpaper to stick, but offers little protection to the walls otherwise.  This leads us to Method 2...

METHOD 2: The second method involves the use of a chemical agent that is added to hot water. This chemical is an enzyme that soaks into the paper and dissolves the paste. It takes a little longer than the steamer, but does a fine job and is less damaging to the walls. The trick is to allow the chemical to do its work, and not to rush into scraping too soon. The paper should be kept wet with the chemical until the paper is loose enough to scrape off EASILY.

The wallpaper stripper is applied with a sprayer, either a hand-held trigger spray type for very small jobs or a pump-type pressurized garden sprayer for entire rooms. Cover the floors with plastic tarps under newspapers to absorb the excess spray and collect the old paper. As waste accumulates, throw away a few layers of newspaper and put additional paper on the tarps.

If the original paper is a non-porous vinyl, you may have to rip the vinyl face from the wall before using either removal method, because neither the steam nor the chemical stripper will easily penetrate the vinyl.

If the vinyl face in not easily pulled off, all is not lost!  You can make small perforations in the vinyl to allow the steam or chemical to pass through. There are two ways to accomplish this neatly and with minimal wall damage.   The first is to use a commercial tool called a Paper Tiger.   Simply rolling the Paper Tiger over the wall causes a small roller with pin-like protrusions to perforate the surface of the paper, leaving the wall underneath undamaged.

A lower tech alternative is to use a moderately stiff wire brush. Simply drag the brush across the surface of the wallpaper to scratch it. Just don't get too carried away, or the marks will pass through to the wall below, forcing you to do additional wall repair later.

After the paper is removed, you can remove small amounts of residual paste using hot water and just about any wall washing detergent, or you can use the wallpaper stripping chemical as a final wash.  If there is lots of paste left, though, you may need to respray the walls with the chemical stripper to soften it. Then, use a scraper or putty knife to remove the residual glue, followed by a final rinse with a sponge dipped in the stripper.

If you are going to paper again, your prep is almost done.   Just give the walls a light sanding to remove any roughness and clean up all the dust before beginning the wallpapering process.

If you are going to paint, prime the walls with one coat of a sealing/stain killing oil-based primer. You may have to sand again after this prime coat. The roughness is more paste being lifted by the primer. If you don't sand it off and then coat with a latex paint, it will be difficult or impossible for you to remove the roughness later!

After the primer is fully dry, you can sand it , clean up all the dust, and then put one or two coats of any paint your heart desires!

Good luck,

I didn't actually buy all that much stuff to apply paint, but I bought every tool I could find for removing wallpaper---this house was covered with the stuff, and aside from Victorian era roses on a red background in the dining room that elicited a squeal of delight when Page & I first saw the house, it all had to go. My horror stories are fairly mild---4 layers, two interleaved with paint in the kitchen, and wretched prep in the studio. You may as well stand to gain from my pain.

One. Those paper tiger things are worthless. Save your money. Slice the paper with a razor---gently!---if you need to get water to penetrate. Quite often water, or wallpaper dissolver, will eventually soak thru even modern wall coverings.

(An aside: Authentic wall paper, as for the bottom two layers in the kitchen, is actually fairly easy to remove, but it hasn't the water resistance and durability of modern wall coverings. The roses mentioned above, as far as I could determine from my researches, do indeed date from the Victorian era, even though the house doesn't, but the actual covering was made with modern pigments and substrate.

Unlike most modern printing of any kind, which is flat aggregations of tiny dots of ink, this paper was surface printed, with one pass for each of the eight colours, plus background. Similar wall coverings boasted of being printed from the original metal rollers individually cut for each pattern. There are modern updates to the process, which, as it reminds me of the hand made silk-screen cards my mom and I used to make, is worlds more attractive than the offset printed stuff. Though by no means the upper end at $35 or so for a double roll---wallpaper can cost up to $200 a roll---this paper isn't something you'd find at Home Depot. I was thrilled to find it still in production, and used it in other colorways elsewhere throughout the house to tie the decor together.)

Two. Buy lots of good sharp blades, and plan on changing them every 45 minutes of consistant labor. (Bonus: removing wallpaper and scrubbing walls is excellent exercise. I went down to single layers---as opposed to the typical 4 layers I wear during the winter--- with the thermostat turned to 55 and that's cold in a house this drafty, eating Japanese junk food all the while. And still lost weight.)

Three. If you have more than a room to do, buy that blue goop for removing wallpaper in gallon containers and apply it with a sponge mop. Repeatedly if necessary (and it probably will be. Removing wallpaper is definitely an iterative task: only the stuff in the basement stairwell came off with a single, satisfying rip. So plan on wetting and razoring. Over and over and over.) I used three kinds of scrapers, all of which are shown in the tool picture. The big wallpaper scraper was probably my favorite for paper, though it was a toss up between it and the carbide tool for paint. The cheapie window scraper is nice for tight areas.

Four. Buy a good quality drop cloth. It's much less of a slip and fall hazard. You will never go back to plastic, and it absorbs the water that will be dripping everywhere as well as the paint you'll be applying later.

Now, the one thing I didn't try that the wallpaper shops recommended was renting a steamer. If I had to do over again, I'd try it; I've heard mixed reviews on its effectiveness, so that's all I can contribute on that topic.

Okay: so removing wallpaper in the kitchen, which was properly painted and sealed, just took a lot of effort. No such luck in the studio. Most of the house is traditional three-coat plaster---lovely stuff. The studio walls, being part of a more recent addition, were sheathed with 3/8'' sheetrock. The standard is 1/2''; and I prefer 5/8'' fire-rated drywall: it's more rigid, thus resistant to dents, bowing etc, it (like genuine plaster) seals out more outdoor noise) and it's safer besides. (The downsides is that it's heavier and sometimes---but not always---costs more.)

The walls were haphazardly primed with a single coat of paint and not sealed nor sized. Moreover, the wallpaper hanger (as I understand many pros now do) didn't soak the paper to use the pre-pasted glue; instead, s/he just rollered a layer of separately purchased glue. This is supposed to be faster and less messy. But it also ruins the strippability. (Evidently a lot of people, like the former owner, think everyone who comes after them will love their taste---or figure since they won't be taking it down, don't give a rat's ass.)

So, despite a great deal of care and effort on my part, I ruined the paper on the drywall: because it wasn't primed and sealed properly, the water damaged it, particularly the paper. Despite repeated efforts to repair it with mud so as to provide the next person with a good, flat paintable surface, it blistered and bubbled, and finally, I gave up. The next owner will either have to do a busy surface, as I've done, or rip out the drywall and replace it---or they can put in more badly applied wallpaper, I suppose...

Chip...Chip...Chip... Nothing is more tedious in Do-It-Your Self Home Renovation that stripping off old wallpaper. Unfortunately in our home, we had literally rooms full of the former owner's taste in beige vinyl. It was.. ummm...washable... but certainly not to my taste. The first year we lived here we got the living room and hall pulled down, and some inexpensive paint put up on the walls. However, this year I decided it was TIME. We were going to get the last of it down, and the walls painted the colours I liked. The one big hurdle was the dining room which in addition to 10 layers of wall paper, also had that fake "stucco paint" painted over the wallpaper too. Now "fake stucco can be a good wall solution if nicely done, but well..enough said.

My husband had been promising to get this down so I could paint in there for 5 years... Yes, five years. We are pretty temperate about home decor. He is a wonderful man who re-built our front porch rather than pull down the "fake stucco." But I decided it was TIME -- and started to tackle the job. It was horrible. The cheapest and easiest way to get wall paper down is to spray it with a mixture of vinegar and water done half and half. This will take off one layer of plain paper, or the underlayer of vinyl paper after you peel off the plastic. It was no match for "fake stucco" and ten layers of victorian wall coverings.

I priced some home repair fellows and --Yikes--- $400!!!

I priced a steamer (which I know is bad for my allergies) at $100 plus for a weekend rental --not counting solutions.

And then someone at my husband's work told him to try a mixture of half water and half fabric softener. This worked like magic on the wallpaper layers and loosened the stucco so it could be flipped off the under layer of wallpaper in big chunks. I highly recommend this to you if you are doing wallpaper removal. Here are the directions below.

WALLPAPER REMOVAL INSTRUCTIONS:

1 Cup of Water
1 Cup of Inexpensive Fabric Softner
Old Spray Bottle, Roller, or Cloth
Scraper

Mix water and fabric softner and pour into spray bottle. Spray onto the wall paper to be removed. Let sit about 5 minutes, and try to see if the wallpaper peels free. It should scrape off easily with the scraper. If it still sticks, wait another 10 minutes and try again. Have cup of tea. Relax. Come back and check again. For vinyl wallpaper you will have to score it before you spray. This will let the remover solution penetrate.

With multiple layers of wallpaper you may have to peel it off layer by layer. My experience with vinyl wallpaper is that you peel off the vinyl layer, and then the paper backing layer.

When you have peeled off all layers, scrub the walls down with a vinegar/water solution. Let dry and paint.

(NOTE: I have only tried this on plaster walls. On wall board this my remove the paper covering of the wall board!! I don't know. Use with caution! Test a small inconspicuous area to see any bad effects first!!!)

The very subject conjures up thoughts of the mess, the cleanup, the repair.  It can make one shutter.  Please keep in mind that certain wallpapers require specialized techniques and may require the services of a Wallcovering Removal Specialist.  If at any time during a project you see the walls becoming damaged STOP and consult a professional.

While today's Wallcoverings are generally easy to remove, older papers and those not installed properly can be difficult and messy to take down. Hiring a professional can save time, money and many headaches.

Wallcovering Plus also offers the service of wallpaper removal. By using professional wallpaper removal products and techniques, we can often remove your existing wallpaper with minimal wall damage. After the wallpaper is removed, we can prepare the walls for the application of new wallpaper, texture and paint, or faux finish.

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