Wallpapering Services

How We Prepare Walls Before Wallpapering

When you strip the old paper, there will be traces of the old paste left behind, plus little pimples and bumps and loose specks of plaster or traces of the wallpaper.

To avoid any contamination (and improve the finished look, and reduce time spent sanding and smoothing back over bumpy filler), we always sand the walls the moment the plaster has dried out. We would use a coarse grit paper with a sanding block. Here we need to be vigorous and thorough, but not too mad! This stage should take no more than 30 minutes. When sanded, we then brush or vacuum the surface for a dust free surface.

Modern plaster(board) walls. Even though we have removed all the paper, sanded, and the plastered walls look ready to paper, we still allow up to 2 hours to check over every surface, filling any small cracks and dings. For us, filling means: fill once; sand; second fill; sand the walls again. We then vacuum all the walls too, leaving the surface smooth, ready for further decoration.

In an older property with lath and plaster walls. Even if the walls look OK, with the paper stripped, bagged and thrown out, we would still allow half a day for filling and sanding. The first post-stripping process – scrub, scrape and wash off very trace of paste – is essential. No effort is spared to make sure that nothing is left to contaminate the filler or the paint that goes straight on to bare plaster.

Rake out cracks with the edge of a scraper. We then take a blade and just slightly open up the joint. We would clean it out with a vacuum or blow hard. Deep cracks are dampened before filling in layers.

Sand with a sanding block. Once the filler has dried hard, we sand the whole wall area with 80 grade abrasive paper on a sanding block attached to a vacuum extractor.

Finally, we vacuum the tops of skirting boards and clean the floor. Repeat the filling, sanding, cleaning process.

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