Send out the ravens! (Yes, that Game of Thrones joke still makes me smile.) The wallpaper stripping has officially begun.
I was surprisingly eager to tackle the half bathroom first. Strange, I know — wallpaper removal is my kind of pastime. Since our house has wallpaper in five different rooms (the foyer, half bath, kitchen, dining room, and main bathroom), I decided to test a different removal method in each space and report back on the pros and cons. My goal was to figure out which techniques work best and which ones are best left alone.
First things first: I cleared the counter and removed accessories like the soap dispenser, mirror, and toilet paper so nothing would get in the way of the peeling. Then I unscrewed the wall plates around switches and the outlet to free up the edges of the paper. I couldn’t help but admire how meticulously the previous installer matched the wallpaper pattern around the outlets and switches—details like that make removal both satisfying and a little bittersweet.
The method I chose for this room was wonderfully simple: boiling water, applied with a spray bottle. No scoring, no steamer, no spackle knife, no fabric softener—just hot water. I’d read that this approach can work really well, and since this was the smallest room, it felt like a low-risk place to try it. If it failed, I could switch to another technique without too much fallout.
Filling the spray bottle was a small adventure. I worried about burning myself, so I plunged the empty bottle (no cap) into the pot of boiling water and used a ladle to keep it submerged while it filled. That worked, but the bottle warped a bit from the heat. It still sprayed, so I went on with the job, using a silicone pot holder to protect my hand while I worked.
Here’s what I learned from the process:
- Working in small sections is far more effective than spraying the entire room at once. When I sprayed everything first, the areas I treated earliest began to dry and readher to the wall before I could peel them. Saturating one section at a time (for example, half of a wall) and peeling while the paper was still wet makes removal much easier.
- Spraying repeatedly does give your forearm a workout. For larger rooms, a pump sprayer or garden sprayer could save your wrist. In this tiny bathroom, though, a large sprayer would have been awkward and cumbersome.
- Hot water really does loosen adhesive and backing effectively, but the spray bottle itself remained quite hot to handle, so a pot holder or glove is a good idea. The heat made the paper come away cleanly for the most part, so the extra care was worth it.
- Most of the wallpaper’s front layer came off in the first round of wetting and peeling, which took about 1.5 hours. After that I went back over the walls, re-sprayed the remaining backing and glue, and peeled again. The second pass took roughly another 1.5 hours, making the whole job about three hours from start to finish.
When I finished, I had a full garbage bag of old wallpaper and bright white walls. That clean, de-flowered white was a glorious sight after weeks of staring at pattern-heavy walls.
Removing that one wallpaper type felt like a small victory: now there are four types of wallpaper left in the house instead of five. I’m not opposed to wallpaper—there are many lovely patterns that can suit a home—but right now I’m enjoying the simplicity of the white space. I also kept a small section of one floral remnant; I’m thinking of framing little squares of each pattern as a keepsake of the project.
So that’s one removal method down and documented. The boiling-water-and-spray-bottle approach worked well in a compact room when you work in small areas and accept that a bit of patience is required. Next up: testing a different technique in another room to see how it stacks up.
P.S. — Who else is watching Whodunnit? We caught the first episode last night and were hooked.