Please Everyone!! Seal Your Drywall before Wallpapering

Q My entire kitchen had wallpaper. I was unsure how to take it down so I had a friend help. However, lots of drywall peeled off with the wallpaper. Can you tell me what to do? This is why we every paperhanger or decorating professional recommends priming your drywall with primer before hanging up your wallpaper. When you prime your walls beforehand, wallpaper is easy to install, because the glue on the back stays slightly wet, so you can push the sheets into alignment. And when you want to change it, the primer will help the wallpaper come down easily, leaving your wall intact. When you don't add a primer over your drywall, the front of the drywall absorbs and bonds with the adhesive. This makes the wallpaper not only more difficult to hang but extremely difficult to remove. See Also: How to Remove Wallpaper Your problem is a very common one: because the glue soaked into the drywall itself, and not the primer, the wallpaper will come down with large chunks of drywall attached to it. If you do not prime your walls BEFORE installing wallpaper you will probably be left with various gnashes in the wall and lot of areas of tattered, somewhat woolly brown paper, which drywall manufacturers install underneath the paper face to hold  it together. Ah, the price we pay later for shortcuts taken now! If you find yourself in this unfortunate situation, your next step should be to paint your damaged walls with a primer that seals especially well. When our company actually hung paper, we always used a pigmented shellac to seal in drywall. Some other companies like to use oil-based primers, which contained petroleum solvents. Both are good options but they both produce fumes that many people today do not want to breathe in.  See Also: Why You Should Prime Walls Before Hanging Wallcoverings See Also: To Prime or Not To Prime, That is The Question! Most water-based primers will not work because they do not block condensation and humidity well enough. The wall surface must be sealed or the leftover paper will bubble up when you try to smooth it over with drywall mud or paint. Zinsser Co makes specialty primers designed to solve specific home improvement complications like this one. We know of at least one water-based surface sealer called Gardz that works well. Its made from acylic resins that soaks in the walls and turns them rock-hard. They can then be re-primed, mudded over, and painted/wallpapered again.