To absolutely detest wallpaper, in fact it should be fecking banned

[ApocalypseCheeseToastie]

I can't bloody stand the stuff, who on earth came up with the idea ? Who ?

Who saw a perfectly good house with nice walls and thought to themselves, I know what i'll do, i'll giftwrap it ?

A twat, that's who.

Because the problem with wallpaper is it has to be scaraped off to be replaced, EVERY LITTLE PIECE

In stupidly high places.

I mean what is the sodding point in hanging wallpaper 30foot in the air ? PAINT the fucking thing you fools, it's easier.

I hope you appreciate this thread btw, it was posted with blistered hands from a wilted cheese who has spent the day scraping walls in preperation for new blissful, cglorious plaster. Which will then be painted with relish.

If i'm not around tomorrow it's because I snapped my neck trying to get the wallpaper off the fucking ceiling in above the landing with a huge drop that some sadistic twat hung 20 or so years ago

I feel your pain and frustration Apocolypse.

If only Denis Potter had written 'pink distempered walls' instead of 'blue remembered hills' but there's always a tasteful (George) Osborne & Little wallpaper to cover the cracks.

All the old adages come scrurrying back: where there's a will there's a way, necessity is the mother of invention etc. If in doubt, plasterboard and a neutral paint colour covers a multitude of sins.

But for now, have a 'and breathe' - it'll look different in the morning.

Oh, another good thing about artex is that if your really shit at painting walls, it doesn't matter. I'm not too bad, but DB is fucking shocking, and he came round to help us paint. We didn't let him paint our non-artex ceiling, that would be folly.

Oh how can anyone hate wallpaper? Beautiful, glorious thick and sumptious!

I spent hours in the basement of John Lewis choosing between hundreds of glorious samples. It just makes some rooms so cosy.

But I agree that woodchip is the work of the devil. It took us weeks to get it off and with it came half the walls!

God no, I love the stuff

so long as I don't have to buy it, apply it, or strip it

i love wallpaper porn and spent an obscene amount of money on two rolls just last month.

You're going to pain with relish?

A little DIY tip...use paint it'll work out cheaper and attract less insects

*paint

Does anyone ever like anyone else's choice of wallpaper? I never have. I can't even believe what I chose in 1971. I haven't wallpapered since the early 80's. I did do stenciling though, and many complicated paint jobs which I thought were cool but changed to plain paint to sell. Don't think it helped, the house still took forever to sell.

Sometimes people put thin sheetrock over bad wallpaper.

My son and DIL liked one house which needed a lot of wallpaper taken down and I advised them not to buy it for that reason.

I am going to have De Gournay wallpaper when I win the lottery. I will love it for the rest of my life, and should any future occupant of my house ever try to remove it I will return from my grave as a poltergeist.

ninedragons, that wallpaper is lovely, I utterly love the windy blossomy one. Is it pricey then? I would look great on our lounge wall

I priced it a few years ago (before I had DC, snurk) and it was over $1000 (about 660 quid) a panel.....

My fantasy house has the Indian landscape one in the dining room and the koi one in the master bedroom.

Hahahahahahahaaaaaa

Our bloody kids would only go and scribble on it.

Perhaps I could swap them for a few rolls of hand painted silvery loveliness.

That wallpaper is lovely, I agree. In fact I think I saw the green one with the birds at Chatsworth. But eeek at cost.

I feel quite sad about wallpaper, although I have pulled my parents kicking and screaming into the 21st century and there is now wallpaper in only 2 rooms - yay! I feel though, because my dad always used to write little messages on the walls under the paper - things like the date, the cost of milk and petrol, what was going on in the news and the family.

It was like finding a time capsule everytime they stripped the paper to do it again. [wistful emoticon]

I love grasscloth for walls. A friend bought an old house whose reception rooms came with the original 1903 (or really, really old) grasscloth wallcovering. I thought it was fantastic.

How would you begin to clean that, math?

I love wallpaper, too. We don't have any, because DH is a minimalist sort, but I do long for a good chinoserie feature wall now and then.

I think she hoovered it with the nook and cranny attachment, the one with the little brush. It took her a while. I have no idea what colour the grasscloth was when it was originally hung. I imagine it had developed quite a patina over the century it had been there on the walls.

It comes in the kind of colours I like for paint.

God, I could not live with a minimalist.

We'd come to blows.

I love some wallpaper, like the link ninedragons posted, but even that would be a pain in the arse. I'd like it if I were rich and could redecorate on a whim. :o

When we moved in there were wallpaper borders everywhere. Different in every room, even with a semi open floor plan. I'm going to see if I can dig up some samples of the atrocities that formerly graced my walls...

Living Room

Kitchen

Master Bedroom , to complete the lovely bruise colored walls.

Also, the dining room had a border of particularly vaginal-looking calla lillies. So sitting on the couch you'd see hunting dogs, fanjos, and sickly hearts and stars all without moving an inch. Gorgeous.

Also we pulled off the faux-stone linoleum to reveal plywood, which we then stripped off to reveal the original linoleum, which was backed in some black tarry substance that took DH and my dad two days, paint thinner, a heat gun, and lots of cursing to remove.

I knew as soon as I saw the thread title you'd spent all day scraping.

I was doing the same thing from 8am - 9pm yesterday and still haven't finished (it's only the bloody dining room, above the dado rail and one wall is virtually all window). I swear the idiots that owned the place before us must've used 'no more nails' instead of wallpaper paste.

I don't dislike wallpaper - but it's such a pain in the arse if you want to change anything - would never do more than 1 'feature wall'

Yank - your house sounds like ours - the decor wasn't that bad, but everything was botched. It took us 3 days to find the switch to turn off the light over the back door when we moved in (on top of a kitchen wall cupboard).

Every time we've stripped paper we've found layers and layers going back to the original 1930's stuff underneath.

The (self built) conservatory had a damp course on the wall that joined the house but not on the exterior walls (WTF!) so we've had to pull that down because the floor kept rotting. And when we had the kitchen re-fitted last year we discovered that all the kitchen and conservatory electrics were running off the same socket. not to mention the fact that they'd managed to bury the stopcock under the floorboards so the only way to stop the mains water in an emergency was to access the one outside in the road!

Stripped the artificial ceiling out of the bathroom to find two enormous holes where they'd planned to re-site light fittings, changed their minds and not bothered making good. The stripped off the wood panelling to discover they'd fixed it to the studwork with 'no more nails' and there was no actual wall beneath it.

Phew...rant over!

We're moving into a new house (new to us) on Friday and it has lots of "feature walls". Joy.

I know, ninedragons, for years it was fine because he's got lovely taste and I felt so unconfident by comparison that I was happy to let him have free reign, but now I find myself having to justify the fact that YES, we are having floral cushions on the wingchair (and YES it will be a wingchair) in the otherwise navy-and-dark wood study.

I still want to see photos of your home after you posted the other day about your living room!

It took me 8 years and 7 months to be brave enough to tackle the woodchip in what was DD's bedroom. It's now ours which gave me the shove I needed. A decorator told me once the secret is a long handled wallpaper stripper, a blade on a long handle. He's not wrong, it took it off really easily and the plaster stayed on the wall. £7 or something like that in Homebase.

Painting over wallpaper..... The best of both worlds :o

Ha, I raise your wallpaper, woochip, artex- I give you CORK (nods sagely).
I kid you not, twas all the rage! Had to be applied with special glue, crumbled after a while, shit to remove

AND

HESSIAN- even stickier glue, impossible to apply properly if you were an amateur, trapped the dust and FADED like mad.

Aah yes, those were the days.