I just moved into a 50+ year old house. One of the rooms has what looks to be painted over wallpaper on the walls -- you can see seems, nail pops, bubbles, etc. I took a scraper and popped one of the bubbles and was able to scrape off paint/paper pretty easy. If I scape lightly, I am left with a brown fuzzy backing on the wall. If I scrape a little harder, the brown fuzzy paper comes off and I get to a smoother brownish sort of wall board.
I am not sure if the brown fuzzy backing is still part of the wallpaper or part of the wallboard. Also, when I can see some seams of what looks like wallboard after scraping one area. Assuming I am able to remove the parts that need to be removed, is it ok to still see a seam or does I need to do something to fill/tape the seam?
Can someone give me some advice on what I need to do? I am a novice but would like to remove all of these imperfections and then repaint the entire room.
based on personal and second hand experience (assuming i understand the situation, and i think i do):
stop scraping. stop messing with the wall paper. tear it down and re-rock the room. it will take much less time. if you absolutely insist, re rock over the old wall with new sheetrock. better yet, tear the old stuff off.
I would like to add two cents worth of experience as well. I had about 90 square feet of wall with multiple layers of paper. I scraped and scraped and found the wall board also. What a mess! I decided to skim coat and a lot of it bubbled. I scraped again and skimmed again. I did a few times. I really learned how to skim coat. It took me about three weeks to get it right in my spare time on the weekends and nights. I can say that it turned out well, but I would not want to do this again. You need a very large spackling blade 10" or bigger to get good results. You can hire a pro.
No no no! There is no need to re-rock the whole room! Don't panic. I had a similar experience in my newly purchased house, except with more wallpaper. My kitchen had the original wallpaper from when it was build (no primer was used, of course) then there was a white wallpaper primer applied overtop of it and then more wallpaper. This time it was the kind with the paper backing and vinyl front. What a nightmare. Here is what I did, and it looks fine today.
First, I got the wallpaper off any way I could. That involved a lot of scraping with DIF Wallpaper Remover (I LOVE that stuff). You can find it in any home store, it's a blue gel that comes in a spray bottle. Scrape as much of the paint off as you can and saturate the wallpaper with the DIF. Let it sit for 5-10 minutes and scrape away. This may tear the wallboard as well exposing the brown under-paper since there was paint on top and probably no primer underneath, but that gets taken care of in step two.
After you get all the wallpaper off you will need to purchase another product called Gardz. It's made by Zinsser (the same people who make Killz if you've used that before) and is a bit more difficult to find. I found mine at a local specialty paint store. Call around and someone will have it or can special order it for you. Gardz is basically watered down glue that seals the brown paper so spackle and paint can be applied without bubbling. It's very runny. The best thing that I found to apply it with was one of those disposable sponge brushes. If you have a large area though a roller will work just as well. We went ahead and did the whole wall surface, but it's only really necessary to do the parts where the brown paper is exposed.
After that is all dry, get a big tub of spackle and two spackle knives, a small one and a bigger one. I used a 6" but the bigger the better probably. Use the small one to cover all the brown spots with just your basic coat of spackle, sand. Use the bigger one to do a second coat, sand. Do one more final very smooth, thin, wide coat, sand. That should make the walls smooth enough to prime. This would be the stage to spackle any other spots that need it as well.
Buy some Killz or any other equivalent primer. This not only serves the normal purpose of sealing the spackle but it also makes it easier to see the spots that you may have missed. Once the primer dries spackle any spots you see and you're ready to paint.
My kitchen took me about two weeks of doing it after work and on the weekends and while tedious, wasn't particularly painful. It looks just as good now as the rest of the walls in the house. Good luck! :)
I use a spray bottle with water in it and kept the wallpaper (the brown spots you were referring to) wet and soaked it for a while then scraped it off. Once off I used a sponge with the green scrubbing thing on the side and soem cleaner (stuff called "Awsome" available at most dollar stores) to get the small parts off. then I just fixed the (plaster in my case) with spackling and primed and painted. It takes a long time to do this right.
Sounds like a real mystery! First, I'd spray an area with water, let it soak 15 minutes, spray again, wait again, then LIGHTLY use a wide blade scraper to try to lift off the wall paper. Choose an area about 3'x3'. Getting off what loosens with plain water will allow you to see what kind of a problem you actually have. If you are into multiple layers of wallpaper, it takes repeated spraying and scraping, being careful not to dig or abrade the paper coating on wallboard. The wallboard coating I've seen are light brown. If the wallboard is already damaged, you will have done no more harm. Kind of silly to redo the whole wall if it is only layers of wallpaper. I give it a rest overnight after removing paper before I scrub off the rest of the paste, as the repeated spraying will soften paint and possible the wallboard covering. Good luck. Let us know.
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