I own a wallpaper removal company in Los Angeles and read your magazine regularly.  I always look for articles or information on wallpaper removal and was glad to see yours recently titled “an off-the-wall success story.”  I am just disappointed about some of the techniques that the “experts” give.  The one person who seemed to know what he was talking about was the guy from New York who seemed to be a specialist in the exclusive field of wallpaper removal.  Companies like mine that have specialized in massive amounts of wallpaper removal for the past 20 to 30 years are head and shoulders above your average painter in expertise and knowledge of this trade.

It never ceases to amaze me how much, or actually how little the professional painter knows about the professional wallpaper removal trade.  I also can’t understand why the trade does not recognize this type of business as a separate trade of it’s own, with specific techniques and knowledge that really have nothing to do with painting.  Removing wallpaper has very little to do with painting or even paperhanging for that matter.  Originally since painters/paperhangers are the first ones in, they got stuck with the responsibility to uncover the existing walls.  Today more painters hate it then ever.  Most painters/paperhangers will do some if it’s a small amount, but most we found will prefer not to do it, if they can avoid it.  This seems to hold true especially with the high-end painters.  Many high-end general contractors will know to call us separately because we can do a job 2-3 times faster, which simply translates into that famous line, “more cost effective.”

  Wallpaper removal has as many tricks to the removal as there are papers.  Maybe 50% come off basically the same way (cloth-backed and paper-backed) but that other 50% can be all different.  Most painters get their laborers to do this work if they even take it on.  The problem is that the laborers come and go too often and the removal is inconsistent, so they never get very efficient at doing the wallpaper removal.

To me your article makes this point clear.  You spoke to several people who were painting contractors and some that seem to specialize in wallpaper removal.  I won’t be surprised if it were the painters who are the ones talking about scoring the wallpaper.  Scoring tools that are used for removing wallpaper are in my opinion for the “homeowner” who doesn’t know the real tricks.  There are much faster methods than scoring or sanding.  Not to mention that sanding is very dirty.  It can get washed into a carpet when you spray your water and it can stain if it’s not well protected or vacuumed before you soak the wallpaper.  It can also float in the air for hours and damage clothes in closets and electronics such as computers and alarms.  I learned that lesson about 25 years ago when I was still experimenting when they had more vinyl-coated papers, flocks and foils.  Today most papers are the paper backed and cloth backed vinyl type that separates from it’s backing fast and easily.  Most of the rest consist of papers that are layered and a vinyl coating on its surface or the pattern part of the paper.  This makes it waterproof and a problem for the unfamiliar painter or homeowner that attempts to remove it with a scoring tool.

There are very few of these types of papers that we can’t remove by a method we call “slice and peel”.  This method is 3-5 times faster in the hands of a professional remover than sanding and scouring.  The trick is to have the knowledge of the particular paper the moment you see it.  Does the paper peel dry, or do you wet once and let dry again and then peel?  Do you wet 2 or 3 times and let dry out just a little or let it dry out completely before you slice and peel?  When you know the papers you can then slice and peel large pieces of the top of the paper or the pattern part.  When you are good at this you can then know whether to peel it up, down, to the left, or right, or down and to the left or so on.  A 10’ wall can then be done in a matter of minutes.  There are very few times in a year that this method would not work and we would have to resort to a “dry scrape”; this method is also much faster and cleaner in the hands of an expert remover.  That is where we would have to slice small pieces of the top layer or pattern part of the wallpaper off the wall with a standard scrapper.  This is done dry, and you get pieces the size of someone’s hand on each slice.  We can do this even on drywall without hurting the wall.  Once all the pattern part of the paper is gone you can easily soak the backing and have it all removed without having “dry spots” that you get with scoring it.

My company is called Wallpaper Down and I started this company 28 years ago because of a paperhanger that said “we have a problem in our industry, in that we don’t like removing wallpaper.”  If the painters and paperhangers put more time in sealing and prepping the walls, prior to hanging, as they do trying to remove wallpaper, there would be very little of those bare drywall nightmare jobs.  A painter may claim to be an expert because they run into a few rooms a week or a big company may do as many as 10 rooms of removal in a week; my company will do up to 60 rooms in a week.

 It’s companies like mine that are the real unspoken experts to this trade.  Many years ago, the painter and paperhanger were one in the same.  Today very few do both, it evolved because they had a need to be better at each individual trade thus specializing in one or the other.  Perhaps in the future there will be a trade publication called WallpaperRemovalPRO and the painters and paperhangers will leave it to the real pros.

Wallpaper Down has an impressive list of credits, some of which include a guest expert for the Home Show, a national broadcast on ABC in 1988.  Wallpaper Down also had a write-up in the Los Angeles Magazine in 1989.  I have also given lectures on the art of removing wallpaper to various groups.

 Sincerely,

 Andy Vanoni

Wallpaper Down