Wallpaper Painting Mistakes To Never Make in Scripps Ranch, CA

In the course of looking to paint one of the interior rooms of your home, you may well find that you have wallpaper on one of the walls.

However, if you find that you are going to need to keep the wallpaper on the wall for one reason or another, it’s not just going to be a matter of taking some paint and applying it right onto the wallpaper — that would be a mistake, the kind of which we will be discussing in greater detail today.

Let’s have a look at some wallpaper painting mistakes to never make.

1. Painting Directly Over Wallpaper

One mistake that might be made when you think you need to paint over wallpaper is to just paint directly on the wallpaper itself.

The process of painting involves having the right kind of surface to be painted, and the wallpaper itself is not that kind of surface.

You first have to prepare the wallpaper to be painted and that involves cleaning it and gently sanding it so that it is smoother and then applying a coat of primer so that you seal in the wallpaper and get it ready to be well painted.

Skipping any of these steps will make for a lesser painting project as it were.

2. Not Sealing Loose Bits

Though of course, you have already determined that the wallpaper cannot be removed prior to trying to paint — perhaps it turns out that if you remove the wallpaper it will cause too much damage to the wall — but if there is some loose wallpaper you need to seal it down before you start the painting process.

This means that you will have to take the same kind of measures that are normally used to get the wallpaper to go on in the first place but perhaps less so, as you will only have a little bit to get to stay on the wall.

Once you have made sure that any loose pieces of wallpaper are properly attached to the wall you’ll be able to go on with the next steps of the painting project.

3. Using Water Based Primer

You may come to think that when you are applying a primer to the wall, it’s not going to matter what kind of primer is used just so long as you’re using a primer to seal the wallpaper before painting.

This is a mistake — if you make use of a water-based primer rather than an oil-based primer, you may end up loosening the wallpaper from the wall instead and this could be quite disastrous in perhaps making a mess of your walls rather than making them look nicer.

Do yourself a favor and make sure that the primer that you use is oil-based so that you don’t have these kinds of problems with your painting project.

4. Too Much Water When Cleaning

Lastly, remember that even though it’s imperative that you clean the walls before you start your painting project, you aren’t going to want to make use of too much water in doing so.

As mentioned above, getting wallpaper wet is a way that you’re possibly going to loosen it away from the walls — and you have already made the decision that you’re not going to try to remove the wallpaper from the wall, so getting them too wet is not something that you want to do.

To ensure that you don’t overapply water, you are going to make use of cleaning cloths that are damp but not overly damp, and you will perhaps even make use of a detergent solution to get any grease off of the walls as necessary.