This wall has a texture on it that will look bad under the new wallpaper, and it will also interfere with adhesion. So the wall needs to be skim-coated / skim-floated to smooth it. But the current paint on the wall is glossy, as you can see on the right side of the photo. The smoothing compound is sticky stuff, but it (like many coatings) cannot be trusted to adhere to a shiny surface. I say it’s like the toy Colorforms … the new material will kinda stick – but not really stick . But if the surface is dull , or matt finish , the new coating will be able to grab ahold and adhere . To make this wall surface dull , I’m rolling on a primer that will dry with a flat / matt finish . There are various primers out there that will adhere to a glossy surface and then dry flat. But I’m using my trusty wallpaper primer , Roman Pro 977 Ultra Prime . Yes, this is a wallpaper primer . But it also checks all the boxes … it sticks to just about anything , it dries quickly, especially with a fan blowing on it, and it dries with a matt finish that wallpaper paste – and smoothing compound – will adhere to. At $70 or more per gallon , yes, this stuff is expensive . But it works , it’s low odor , it’s already on my truck , and it saves having to carry around an assortment of of primers and materials. Here’s my smoothing compound. Sheetrock brand Plus 3 joint compound used for working with drywall . Note that quick-dry formulas , nor spackling compound , are not suitable and won’t hold up under wallpaper . You can search here for my other posts to see more about the smoothing process for textured walls .
Here I’m preparing to hang wallpaper on new drywall in a new addition to a 1930’s home in east Houston . First I’ve used a damp sponge to remove all construction and sanding dust. Next I’m going to apply my primer. It’s important to note that, even though this is wall is a new sheet of drywall, it’s not all the same surface. We have mostly large expanses of drywall / greenrock (the type of drywall that’s used in wet areas ). But at the joints , and covering where the screws and nails hold the drywall to the studs , we have joint compound . That’s the strips of white areas. And next to the crown and door molding and the baseboards is overspray from the paint that was applied to the wood trim. Here I’ve applied my light blue-tinted wallpaper primer over the top 1/3 of the wall. It’s important to be sure that the primer you use is suited for use under wallpaper . But also that it will properly adhere to and seal all the surfaces on the wall . My primer (below) will stick to just about anything. But this photo is interesting. Because my primer has been rolled on evenly across the wall , and cut in with a trim brush along the trim and corners . But you see that the primer is drying at different rates . On the right side of the photo, the primer is applied over the bare drywall, and it’s drying quickly. But toward the left, next to the door trim , the primer is drying more slowly. This is because there is paint overspray next to the door trim . The paint is semi-gloss enamel , and my wallpaper primer reacts with it differently from how it reacts to flat paint or drywall or other surfaces. Not a big deal. Just be aware of the need for different dry times due to different surfaces the primer is applied to. My preferred wallpaper primer is by Roman , called Pro 977 Ultra Prime. It’s not readily available, but you can find it on-line. All Sherwin-Williams stores can get it from the distribution center – but not all store managers know that, or are willing to do so. I get mine from Murphy Brothers Paint on Bissonnet near the Rice Village , who stocks it just for me.
You are looking a the plastic escutcheon / decorative cover to hide plumbing pipes under this pedestal sink. Someone painted it the same color as the wall, and with the same wall paint. Only problem is, most paints won’t stick to plastic. Plastic is too slick. That’s why now the paint is peeling off with just the slightest tug or tension. It’s peeling away like a snake shedding his skin. There are some solutions for this. For starters, the plastic could have been sanded, to give the paint some “tooth” and something to grab ahold of. There are also primers that will adhere to plastic and prepare it to take the paint. Even simpler, there are paints formulated to stick to plastic. Krylon makes some, and I’ve used it on my outdoor lawn chairs; it’s held up nicely for about 20 years.
Tomorrow this breakfast area wall will get wallpaper. Today is prep day.The wall has a very heavy texture, plus some issues with previous patches in areas, probably due to drywall cracks. I need to skim-float over all this to smooth the surface. In addition, the current paint is quite glossy – and this can present a problem for the smoothing compound to adhere to it properly. So I want to prime over this gloss paint before I skim-coat the walls. The primer has to both stick to the gloss paint and provide a base that the smoothing compound will adhere to. Another issue is that I won’t be using this every day, so keeping it shaken up and useable was a consideration. I looked high and low for an appropriate primer. Finally I snapped that the Roman Ultra Prime Pro 977 that I use under my wallpaper jobs checks off all the boxes … It sticks to just about anything, and it dries nice and flat / matt so any topcoat (wallpaper or smoothing compound) can grab ahold and stick, I have it in my van all the time, and I use it frequently enough that it’s always mixed up and ready to use. To top it all off, it dries in less than an hour. Voilà! This stuff can be tricky to find. Sherwin-Williams used to stock it for me, but became unreliable. Now Murphy Brothers on Bissonnet (Houston) gets it just for me. Besides dropcloths on the floor, here I’ve tacked strips of thin paper dropcloth material along the wainscoting (I also do this along baseboards) to keep any drops or roller splatters from marring the homeowners’ floor and moldings.Here it is applied. Since my goal is to cover and eliminate the glossy paint, and then provide a base for the smoothing compound, this coat doesn’t need to be opaque or cover the wall evenly. Tomorrow we’ll see how the wallpaper turns out!Fast-forward … I’ve floated the wall and sanded it smooth. Compare the smoothness to the “before” picture at the top.
Most homes in the Houston area have textured walls. These bumps are unsightly under wallpaper, and also interfere with consistent adhesion. So I like to skim-float the walls with drywall joint compound (I use the Plus 3 version) and then sand them smooth. Sanding this stuff creates lightweight, powdery dust that sifts through the air and gets over everything. Homeowners tend to hate that. 🙂 So here I’ve created a ” tent ” out of painter’s plastic along the walls where I will be sanding. This creates a pretty darned effective barrier that prevents dust from getting into the rest of the room. Here’s the dust created by smoothing just the top 5′ of wall area. And my ShopVac to clean it all up. I find it easiest to let the dust fall onto the floor and even the carpet. It’s easy to vacuum dust up off these surfaces. Dropcloths and plastic tend to get sucked up into the vacuum hose, and the dust doesn’t come with it. I once tried protective self-adhesive plastic that’s made to cover carpet … but it was extremely difficult to unroll, plus, it was even more difficult to get back off the floor. I truly feared it would pull off the surface finish of the floor along with it. The vacuum gets most of the dust. But there is still a fine, invisible layer left on surfaces. So you need to take a damp rag and wipe the floor. I also vacuum the walls. After the visible dust is gone, it’s imperative that you take a damp sponge and wipe residual dust off the walls. You have to rinse the sponge frequently to get all the dust. If not, it’s like, as I like to say, it’s like flouring a cake pan – the wallpaper will kinda stick – but not really stick. Once the walls are perfectly dust-free and dry, follow up with a wallpaper primer. Then go and hang your wallpaper!
This is the trap door that leads to the plumbing for the tub on the other side of the wall. The homeowner didn’t like the big white blob in the middle of the wall. Wallpaper won’t stick to enamel or gloss surfaces, so I coated it with my Roman Pro 977 Ultra Prime primer.Even with the contoured molding uncovered, this door now blends into the wall much better.
This Brooklyn Toile wallpaper by Flavor Paper on an accent wall in a nursery went up beautifully. The contractor had added new Sheetrock to one wall, and painted the other, old/original wall. I skim-floated both walls and sanded smooth, primed, and hung the wallpaper. Perfect! (Search here to see my original post.) But within less than a month, the homeowner contacted me and said that the wallpaper was ” coming off the wall .” It was a 1920’s bungalow in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston. And therein lies the brunt of the problem. The wallpaper itself is not ” coming off the wall .” What’s happening is that the wall surface itself is coming apart – or, delaminating . This is because multiple layers of paint and other substances on the wall may not be compatible. A probably scenario: In 1920 oil-based paint was used. Later someone rolled on a coat of latex paint. Then the homeowners redecorated and used gloss paint. Then some ” flippers ” who had watched too much HGTV slapped on more paint without bothering to de-gloss or prime first. And somewhere in the mix you’ve got cheap paint and dust and other incompatible materials.Over time, and especially when stress is put on the wall surface, such as when wet wallpaper paste dries and the paper shrinks, this stress can tug at the wall and actually pull these layers apart. There are other contributing factors, too, such as humidity, temperature, and location. I find it interesting that the worst parts of the affected seams were toward the top of the wall. This speaks of heat, humidity, and forced air (either hot or cold) coming out of the air vent just to the right of this wall. This photo is of the area over a door, very close to the air vent. See how thick that is? It’s not just the wallpaper. There are several layers of wall coming apart. Some layers are clinging to the back of the wallpaper, and some are staying stuck to the wall. Multiple layers, many years of coatings on this wall. Easy to see the many layers. The paper itself, my blue primer, my layer of smoothing compound, paint, more paint coming off the wall. Then multiple layers of paint and texture still clinging to the wall. This shot is just below the ceiling.Same thing happening at the baseboard at the floor. Layers of paint separating from the wall in chunks. Some pulled off easily, and some I had to chop off with my 3″ putty knife.Most of the paint and unstable surface material clung to the back of the wallpaper. This pile is just three strips – only half the wall. But it’s thick and stiff and heavy because of the paint stuck to the back of the wallpaper. There was so much and it was so heavy and bulky that I had to carry it out to my van in two trips. When I got home, it totally filled my trash bin. Here’s the wall once all the other layers came off. Brushing my hand over it revealed a layer of dust. No wonder the paint and other coatings wouldn’t stick. Nothing sticks to dust. It’s like flouring a cake pan… The paint or wallpaper will kinda stick – but won’t really stick. Paint on top may be fine. But add a little stress from drying / shrinking wallpaper, and you may end up with layers that pull apart. Wiping the walls with a damp sponge removed a lot more dust. But the wall still felt chalky. Whatever type of paint this was, it was not holding together. I had to stabilize this chalky surface. Enter Gardz, a wonderful product – Gardz is a thin, penetrating sealer that soaks into porous surfaces and binds substances together. It dries hard and creates an intact surface. The darker area in the picture is where I’ve rolled on a test area. Gardz is thin like water, and it runs and drips and splatters. It’s imperative that you cover floors, countertops, and baseboards, and roll carefully, and roll upward rather than downward, to minimize runs and drips. A microfiber roller holds the liquid well, and reduces drips. Gardz is made by Zinsser. No photo of the finished wall, but I was very pleased with the stability of the surface. No more chalk or dust. Now, there still could be unstable or incompatible layers deeper inside the wall. (Latex paint over oil without proper prep.) But for now I feel pretty confident that this wall is solid and will hold up to the next process in preparation for getting the new wallpaper up.
he lure of (false!) claims of easy to install and easy to remove led these homeowners to purchase peel & stick ” wallcovering ” and try to install it themselves. It did not go well. The wall was coated with a gloss paint, as per manufacturer’s instructions. Yet, here you can see that it is not even trying to adhere to the wall. Many brands come in rectangles of a few square feet, rather than traditional strips that are long enough to reach floor to ceiling. These small rectangles are much harder to keep perfectly lined up, so you are very likely to end up with overlaps or gaps at the seams. It’s not pliable or malleable, so won’t readily be eased into corners or turns. Here, note wrinkles and warps in the corner in the center of the photo, and at the ceiling line in the center top of the photo. The wall was not smoothed before applying the paper, so you see unsightly texture. The roughness is also interfering with good adhesion, because the paper is only sticking to the tops of the bumps, instead to the entire surface. So much for easily removeable. As you can see, trying to take this stuff down – it took the paint along with it.
Texture looks bad under wallpaper, and in interferes with good adhesion. The walls must be smoothed before the paper can go up. Very similar to popcorn texture but not as thick, this sand type finish still sticks out from the wall in some spots as far as 1/4″. That leaves a lot of space between those grains of grit for me to fill in with smoothing compound. Here I’ve used a putty knife to knock off the tops of those grains of sand. At the top half of the photo I am applying the smoothing compound. I use a trowel to do this. It’s slow and labor-intensive, but it gets my eyes close to my work, and it gives me the best control. This had to be applied so thickly that it will take probably two days to dry. Having the air conditioner or heat running helps pull moisture out of the material. Once it’s dry I will sand it smooth, and then prime it for wallpaper. I like Sheetrock’s Plus 3 lightweight joint compound for this task. It adheres well and sands easily. The regular version (in the red, white, and green box) is very difficult to sand. Hot mud or quick dry or 20 minute mud should not be used, as primers and pastes don’t stick well to them.
These nails were holding picture hooks to the wall. The hooks had an adhesive backing. When they were removed from the wall, chunks of latex paint stuck to them and pulled away from the wall, revealing a crumbly sub-surface. This is bad news for wallpaper that might be hung on top of this.Other spots. What happens is, this is a 90 year old house. Over the years, many coats of paint and other surface treatments have been applied to the walls of this dining room. These coatings are not necessarily compatible with each other. Plus they may have been applied without the proper surface preparation. Oil based paint, then latex, then someone rolls on a gloss paint, the next guy follows with latex but neglects to de-gloss the previous layer so the new layer doesn’t really stick well.Somewhere along the line, something got chalky. Here you see I have wiped crumbly chalky substance from inside the wall. This is why the latex paint is not adhering well and pulled away so easily. Nothing sticks to dust or grit or chalk. Gardz is cool stuff. It’s a penetrating sealer that soaks in and actually binds crumbly materials together, drying into a hard, solid mass. The problem here is, it won’t penetrate the paint that is on top of the unstable layer, so we’re still dealing with a wall that has potential to come apart (delaminate). Gardz applied. You can see how it has soaked into the porous areas, but is sitting on top of the latex paint.
The problem with an unstable wall and wallpaper, is that, as wallpaper sits on a wall and the paste dries, the paper shrinks just a tad, and this shrinking puts tension / torque on the wall beneath it. Sometimes this is actually powerful enough to pull the layers inside the wall apart, resulting in seams that split open.
These are not “loose seams,” but the paper actually taking layers of paint and dust along with it. Really can’t be repaired.
So best to find a way to prevent it from happening in the first place. More on that later.
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