Removing Old Wallpaper In Our Bedroom

It took approximately 479 days, but our main bedroom makeover project is officially done! Ever since we first toured this house back in 2022, I’ve wanted to tear down the wallpaper in the main bedroom. It was very busy, wasn’t something I would have personally picked out, and seemed to overwhelm the room in general. You can keep scrolling to see what the room looked like right before we moved in without furniture in it, and then also how it looked for the year and almost-a-half that we lived here without touching the walls.

I actually came around to the wallpaper during that timeframe, and felt like our old existing bedroom furniture somehow complemented the look of it. That said, the space never really felt like ours with the old wallpaper in place. In the end, I decided that I needed to take matters into my own hands and give the room a full dose of the “Carrie Treatment.” You may remember that I spent a few days last year limewashing the bottom of our bedroom walls. This was my attempt at personalizing the room with the hope that I would end up deciding to keep the wallpaper above. It definitely helped, but, ultimately, wasn’t quite enough to convince me that I could skip wallpaper removal entirely.

So, John and I scheduled one week this year to get the project done once and for all. The first step was covering up the limewashed sections of wall with plastic. This was absolutely essential since any moisture would have soaked into the porous limewash, staining it. We taped plastic sheets to the chair rail above the limewash all the way around the room, making sure it covered every bit of those portions of the wall. We pressed down extra hard on the edges of the painter’s tape that we used to hold the plastic in place, but we still ended up with a little bit of seepage under the plastic and onto the limewash. It stained the limewash a little bit, but I think John and I are the only people who could tell you where those spots are. Once the wet marks dried, they are barely visible.

Anyway, that was the first prep that we did. After that, we rubbed/rolled this scoring tool all over the old wallpaper. There are wheels full of small sharp blades on the underside of the tool that perforate old wallpaper when pressed and rubbed over top of it. The point of this step is to allow our wallpaper paste remover solution to soak under the paper better, thereby making it easier to loosen and peel the paper away.

This is the wallpaper paste remover that I have used for every single one of my wallpaper removal projects (I think this is our fifth one in this house). It works great to cut through the sticky paste that’s on the underside of traditional wallpaper, and makes removal go so much faster. Oh, by the way if you followed that link but saw my photo of the paste remover bottle a few images up, the brand I used seems to have changed the look of their packaging, but I think it’s still the same stuff.

Our process goes like this. First, we perforate the wallpaper using that tool I mentioned above, then we liberally spray the wallpaper down with the paste remover. We let that sit for 15 minutes or so, and then we peel up a corner of the paper and get to work removing entire sections using the scraper in this kit. We sprayed the walls down with the paste remover solution every 10 minutes or so, making sure to go back over areas we had already sprayed down. You’ll want the wallpaper absolutely saturated and soaked with this stuff (which is why we had to cover our limewash so carefully—it’s a wet job!).

Make sure you follow the paste remover instructions for diluting the product if you use a concentrate, like we did. For the one we bought, I mixed about 1/2 cup of the solution in a reusable spray bottle filled the rest of the way with hot tap water. You’ll definitely want to wear a mask while using this liquid solution since it does get into the air and is irritating to breathe in.

In order to use the paste remover as little as possible, we also used our fabric steamer to penetrate the wallpaper. The hot steam cut through the paste really well, and we were able to get big, fully intact sections of wallpaper off at one time. You just have to be really patient with this method since you move the steamer very slowly over the wallpaper in order to soak it. I will also say that you definitely still need to use the paste remover pretty liberally. The steamer, when used in conjunction with the paste remover, is just a nice way to use a little less chemical in the end.

It took us four days to get all of the wallpaper down off the walls in our bedroom, and, as you can see above, we were left with drywall in pretty terrible condition underneath. The liquid chemicals and steamer did a number on the drywall, we think, because we had to soak it so much and this 60-year-old drywall that just couldn’t handle the moisture. The vintage wallpaper was also stuck really well to the wall, and it peeled off bits of the drywall at just about every pass of our scrapers. Some walls were better than others, but we still had to repair every single wall.

So, how did we repair it? Again, it was a pretty straightforward process, but it took several more days to complete. We first spackled every one of the divots using this Dap DryDex product and putty knives, let the spackled areas dry overnight, and then we sanded everything down to a super smooth finish.

It sounds so easy when I explain it, but it took hours and days to finish. The divots in the wall were everywhere. Turning on a podcast in the background helped keep my mind occupied during this tedious job, though. Then, when that was done, we had to take pretty much everything out of the room and cover all the rest with plastic (including the closet and bathroom doors) before sanding. Afterward, of course, there was the sanding cleanup, which took forever. It’s safe to say that wallpaper removal is not a project for the faint of heart, but the results, as you’ll see when you keep scrolling, are always, always worth it…

I didn’t realize just how badly the room had been stressing me out until the wallpaper was gone. I decided to paint the repaired walls a nice calming off-white color (the same “No Filter” paint that we used in our kitchen makeover project from Clare Paint), and love how soothing the space feels now. The old wallpaper was just so busy and overwhelming, whereas the soft creamy walls now fade into the distance, making the room look and feel nearly twice as big.

You may have also noticed that we added new furniture to our bedroom! I have lots of things to say about our new bedroom set, so I will save that for its own separate post. In the meantime, I hope you love how our 1960s bedroom came together in the end. I know that some folks will be sad that we got rid of the vintage wallpaper, and I do admit that it looked nice. But I’m too much of a control freak to let someone else design the most visible part of my bedroom. Who knows, I may end up painting the space a much bolder color down the line, but for now I’ll be laying right there in that bed enjoying the peaceful calm of our freshly made-over creamy off-white bedroom.

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