How To Paint Over Wallpaper

Hi, my name is Tom. I work for Aspect Maintenance. I'm a painter and decorator and I'm going to show you how to paint a wall that's been papered.

This particular wall has been lined, which is just a flat paper and it's designed to be painted over. So once the wall has been lined you'll find you need coats to over paint before you can put your top coat on. So this one here would've had a first primer coat which is just a Dulux Acrylic Emotion and then you would probably need three coats to get it to a solid color because you'll find the paper sucks up the paint to start with.

Other things to remember; where you've got seams on the wallpaper you quite often get bubbles, which is where if the paint hasn't taken properly and if you've air behind the paper it sort of tends to bulge up a bit. What you can do with that is get a Stanley knife and cut around. Take off the loose paper and then put an oil based undercoat on top.

Just paint that in and leave it to dry. Once it's dry it seals the paper tightly to the wall and after that you can then fill over the top with a Tetron filler or Poly filler. Rub it flat, and once you've done that your wall is ready to redecorate and repair.

If you had a textured paper, for example with a pattern, and you wanted to paint over the top it's always worth remembering that before you can put your paint over you will need to seal that pattern behind with an oil based under coat again or a primer; preferably oil based. Just to seal that and get a nice flat finish before you start to over paint otherwise you'll see that pattern come back through quite often. If it's a very textured paper you will always see the texture come through.

The only way to get rid of that is to strip the paper and reline the walls. If the walls or if the walls are in good condition you can paint directly onto the plaster with just a bit of filling; something like that. And that's how you would paint various different types of wallpaper.
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