Hi, this is my first posting here, hello all!
Our new house has a lot of embossed wallpaper up to the picture rail, with either woodchip/artex on the ceiling. What to do - stick with it and paint a modern colour, strip the walls (arrgh!) or any other solutions that come to mind?
Thanks in advance!

hello!! welcome to the boards!!

i would definatly leave the ceilings!! give em a fresh coat of paint after a good scrub and they will be fine!!
as for the wallpaper, it depends on the pattern and your personal tastes. you could try and paint it for the timebeing, or hire/buy a steam stripper to get it all off quickly and easily. dont forget to clean up as you go!! lol and keep moving the steamer around the wall to prevent it penetrating the plaster (really bad!!) if its painted already, score the surface with either one of the special scorers in DIY stores,or carefully use the edge of a scraper (again, mind the plaster!!) put up lining paper then paint or paper over the top for a nice smooth finish.
hope this helped!!
Riah

Hi,

If you have the embossed paper in a lot of places try painting a small area - like a hall, in a warm neutral colour so that you can tell what it looks like...

I have this kind of paper in the hall, lounge/diner and up the stairs - its a trellis with grapes and was all magnolia... which probably suits it... you may find that when you paint it doing so lifts the glue sticking it to the plaster and it comes off in places...

But painting it can transform it... depending on the pattern you will need a long fluffy type roller to get into all the nooks and cranys otherwise you end up two tone...

However, you may encounter more problems when you come to strip it off because if it is well adhered then you will have trouble... but you might find the surface comes of leaving the backing on - this is fine because you can just paint over it.

Angela

i there,

When I moved house recently we had some embossed wallpaper that I just couldn't live with so I understand your problem.

That's when I found SmoothOver which allowed me to get a really smooth plaster type surface that I could paint straight onto.

Really easy to use - I certainly wouldn't claim to be a DIY expert, you just scrape off the peaks from the wallpaper and apply the SmoothOver product with the tool that you buy separately over the whole of the wall. It's kind of like Polyfilla but for the whole of your wall! Essentially it leaves a finish like plaster but quicker, easier and cheaper.

Would really recommend giving it a try.

best of luck

Hi Robidoux,

I think that if I used this product it is likely that the wallpaper would simply fall off the wall with the weight as it is quite a complete pattern and if I had to take off all the high points I might as well just strip the walls back - interestingly - from bits that the cats have stripped off, that would be back to the original plaster - so goodness only knows how long this has been up - or whether the previously owners stripped the walls right back.

Angela