The dining room area has a super gross wallpaper on it that has been painted over with white. So I had the great idea to take the wallpaper down. I started ripping down all the paper and found it to be simple and delightfully destructive…. until I realized there was a really gross glue left behind on the wall. I can only hope that anyone reading this post will not have to go through all the trial and errors that I did.

#1 Wallpaper Removal Pointer – Rip off the largest possible pieces. It seems like I was able to get more glue off with the bigger pieces.

First try at glue removal:

We went to Home Depot and bought a Paper Scraper. Its wheels are supposed to perforate, lift, and separate sections of wallpaper from the wall. Our problem is that the wallpaper was already peeled off before we thought of this product so all it did was poke liiiitle mini holes into the drywall. Failure numbero uno. Here is a picture of the product I tried.

Second try at glue removal:

I tried for hours to use a citrus spray purchased at Home Depot  with a metal scraper and was able to complete one wall but with a lot of damage to the sheetrock. First mistake here – was using a metal scraper and the second mistake was buying the citrus spray. It did not help at all over using just warm water.

Third Time is the Charm! Hot Water & Vinegar

Turns out the best solution for me was an equal parts water & vinegar solution with a plastic scraper, NOT a metal scraper. Although it worked great on taking off the glue- it also took off a fair amount of the sheet rock too. When we paint,we are going to have to do some major wall patching.

So here is a 360 degree view of what we lived with for months…. ugh. gross.