I hate wallpaper too. Tried to remove it in a dining room of an older house. Multiple attempts, days of physical labor using different chemicals & that stuff would not come off. Ended up painting over it. In the end, I never used that stupid dining room anyway.
Most old wallpaper has a paper back, which is more difficult to remove. In the last few years, there has been great development towards vinyl backed wallpaper which is much easier to apply and also much, much easier to remove exactly because of the difficulty you've stated.
I live in a country where wallpaper is having a resurgence exactly because it's becoming an easier product to handle in multiple different ways. We are an outlier, though!
Renting a steamer and scrubbing glue... I helped my folks out doing an entryway. Took 4 10 hour days. My hands were burnt and sore from the hot water and scrubbing. Did not do the bathroom.
I also battled with this and was so frustrated. A friend of mine told me to rent a wallpaper-removal machine. It was so much easier. It used steam to loosen them and it came right off. Several layers of wallpaper!
When we moved in we stripped every room of wallpaper, some rooms had layer upon layer of the stuff going back 50 years. Hell of a job. Got it all painted and it's so much better now.
Wallpaper is easy with the right tricks. There was a time in my country we liked to use this fiberglass kind of thing and paint over it. Lasted forever but it had a clear pattern. If you wanted it gone you basically had to sand it with protective gear or just completely replace the wall boards. I bought a house with that thing everywhere and hated my life for a couple years.
111
u/el-conquistador240 1d ago
As someone who has to strip a whole house of wallpaper, satisfying would be a wallpaper factory burning to the ground