I have tried everything to get the paper to stick. Can anyone help?
Clean the walls and paint on a coat of wallpaper primer. Here is a good site of info:
homeguides.sfgate.com/
Here are the questions asked by community members. Read on to see the answers provided by the ThriftyFun community.
What's the best way to get wallpaper to stay up on the vinyl coated gypsum walls in my mobile home?
Local hardware store and ask them a bond to put on the paper. It usually comes in type or container.
I would actually prime the wall of your mobile home before trying to put up your wallpaper. If this is way too much work you need to go back to the hardware store and buy a special wallpaper glue that will stick to a vinyl-coated gypsum wall. They sell different gules that you can use for wallpaper.
When I decorated my son's bedroom, the wallpaper just falls of the walls. Can you help?
By roger from UK
This may sound silly, but did the wallpaper have glue on it? I didn't know that there was plain paper anymore, but I did see it on a decorating show. If the paper was not pre-pasted, it wouldn't stick.
Also, do you mean that it falls right off the wall and rolls up on the floor, or do you mean it just peels off at the corners?
What was on the wall before you put up the wallpaper? Some wallpapers or hardboards have a slick waxy type coating that is "washable", but prevents wallpaper from sticking to it. Vinyl wallpapers are like this.
If the walls were particularly greasy, the wallpaper might not stick either, but I can't see how this would occur in a bedroom. I am thinking of in a kitchen, with cooking grease.
We recently moved into a house where there was only primer on the walls. I had seen on Pinterest where someone had used scrapbook paper to paper walls. I liked the idea and bought some wallpaper paste and archival safe scrapbook paper, and papered one wall to look like a quilt in my sewing room.
It stayed on nicely for almost 5 months then the other night I noticed several sheets have started coming off. The paste I used said it was good for pre-pasted or non-pasted paper. Should I have used sizing even though the walls were only covered with primer? Thanks
By C Wilson
Maybe you can use glue dots to stick the peeling paper back up?
You have to use something like glue dots or the double stick type tape for scrap booking. I did my dining room wall and it looks great. I just used the glue strips for scrap booking that you stick on, peel of the top waxy paper strip, and then stick up on the wall.
We had a Thibaut grass wallpaper professionally put up in a bedroom 4 years ago using Pro 880 adhesive. It looked great and suddenly it started coming away from the wall. The installer (who was highly recommended) came back and used Pro 838 and the next week some of the paper was lying on the ground.
When I went to the company they recommended using a vinyl adhesive. Does anyone have a specific kind of vinyl adhesive that might finally stick? Otherwise, I'm going to have to strip the paper and throw up some paint.The paint that was on the walls may have been slick and the paper is not sticking. This article recommends putting drywall up first.
If this is the case and the paper is no longer sticking after 4 years it could be because of the surface of your walls. You may need to take it down for right now and prepare your walls better. Then you can go ahead and put it back up with the Pro 838. A sander with some light weight sandpaper should do the trick. You can also go to the hardware store and find a wall primer that you can put on the walls to help out.
Before you look into new adhesives, has something changed in your house?
In my limited experience with wallpaper I have found the only time that paper falls off is when the walls are damp.
This happened to us after Hurricane Ivan. We did not even know our walls were painted over wallpaper until Ivan caused leaks in the roof, into the ceiling and down the walls-- then the paper started cracking and bubbling up. It was a big fat mess.
The guy who removed the wallpaper and then re-plastered and painted said that wallpaper rarely has "fails" like this unless there is moisture involved.
Just something to check before you try something else.
The wallpaper will not stick to only one wall. What can I do to fix it? This is a wall that is only 1/2 the length. This is paper that is not prepasted and from the UK.
By MaryAnne from Cranston, RI
Sounds like that wall had something on it. I would gently sand it to rough it up some, or if it is sheet rock, paint it with a primer first, then when it has dried for over 24 hours, try the wall paper again.
You need to wash the wall carefully. There is glue on it from something else that is preventing the paper from sticking.
I have recently decorated 3 bedrooms and a living room with no problems at all, but for some reason I have tried to paper the hall stairs and landing and the paper won't stick. One piece has fallen off completely, and the edges of all the rest of the drops have come unstuck. What am I doing wrong? I haven't had this problem with any of the other rooms.
By Charlene
It could be the different temperature,humidity. It could be a different paint finish, such as in the other rooms the paint was flat or egg-shell.
In the stairway the paint might be semi-gloss or gloss and that should be lightly sanded to rough it up a little. Most things won't stick to a hard gloss surface including wallpaper. Try using a wallpaper sizing after you have lightly roughed it up using 120 sandpaper.
I had a similar problem with pre-pasted paper. Even though the rest of it worked fine, a couple of pieces didn't. I bought wallpaper paste and put it up with that. It worked. I think I also sized the wall, too.
We wanted to re-paper a bathroom. We took down the old paper, though it did not all come down, the vinyl layer came down fine, but the paper part stayed there. We used dry-wall mud, as we had also done a wall patch, for part of the wall we wanted to paper, due to a plumbing issue. We mudded the 'seams' between the previous paper strips, and in the area of the new drywall. There weren't many 'seams', but there were a few and then primed over the entire wall. The new paper seemed to go up fine, but two days laster it looks like it only stuck well in the parts where there was no old 'paper' under. The parts where the old paper was under there, even though it was mudded (in places) and primed over, the paper is coming off. I would have thought the primer would have taken care of any 'issues' in different surfaces. But the real question is, what do we do now? Can we take it down, and then put it back up with paste, or do we have to take it all down, buy new, and start over? Do we need to go back and take all that old paper off the wall, first? How? Another note, is that the paper we were using was over two years old, and had gotten a tad wet on one end, at some point (probably during the 'plumbing issue' that had caused the need for the patch to the hole in the wall). It had gotten wet enough to make it 'challenging' to unroll it, enough to make it stick to it's-self, though not too bad, while we unrolled it. It only tore all the way through all the layers in one small area, most of it was just the paper pulling off the back of the vinyl, in small sections on one end of the roll only. Is it possible that the glue is just too old? Or the moisture that caused that problem, must have made the rest of it less 'effective'? Though it did stick on the 'new' parts of the wall, just fine!
Ive papered bedroom wall after taking down old paper but it wont stick
