How to remove old wallpaper

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Q: I have a great amount of wallpaper on the walls of my house that is about 20 years old. The problem is that whoever hung the wallpaper put it directly on the sheetrock and plaster. I would like to remove it, but don't know how difficult or time-consuming it will be. I also don't know how to remove it. Can I put sheetrock or sheetrock paper over the wallpaper and just start over with paint? -- Marcelle P., via e-mail.A: I know what you are going through, because I had to remove the wallpaper from an 80-year-old house with plastered walls and several layers of paper. We held a steam plate against a section of wallpaper, then waited until the steam had penetrated all the layers of paper before we scraped with a wide putty knife.The steam plate covered only a 12-inch square at one time, and the slippery paper mess on the floor made the job that much more hazardous.Let's hope the previous owners of your house used a sizing on the unfinished wallboard before they applied the wallpaper. The sizing prevents the sheetrock from absorbing moisture from the wallpaper adhesives, which makes removing the wallpaper a breeze using a simple water soaking method.Some of the methods I have tried over the years are:-- Soak the paper using a long-napped paint roller or wet sponge dipped in warm water.-- Soak the wallpaper with warm water using a new pump-action garden sprayer, also know as a Hudson sprayer. A previously used garden sprayer may contain chemical residues.-- Use a spray bottle and warm water.For any of the above soaking and spraying methods, you can substitute a mixture of one-half warm water and one-half laundry softener for the soaking solution to see if that works better. For small stubborn areas, use your steam iron to wet-heat the paper before scraping. In all cases you will have to scrape the wallpaper away without damaging the sheetrock paper. If you damage the sheetrock, repair the gouged areas using a drywall patching compound before priming and painting.The other option, which you suggested, would be to cover the existing wallpaper with a new layer of drywall. You can use quarter-inch-thick drywall on the walls and half-inch-thick drywall on the ceilings. If you try to use quarter-inch drywall on the ceiling, it will droop between the ceiling joists, which are normally set 16 to 24 inches apart. I would not trust using an adhesive to support the quarter-inch drywall ceiling to prevent the drooping, because the adhesive would be attached to the wallpaper, which could fail under the weight. The drywall joints would then need to be sealed and sanded before painting.(Dwight Barnett is a certified master inspector with the American Society of Home Inspectors. Write to him with home improvement questions at C. Dwight Barnett, Evansville Courier & Press, P.O. Box 286, Evansville, Ind. 47702.)