# 11 of 101 tips on house painting and decorating - building maintenance - Painting over your old wallpaper

Here are a a few more tips on house painting and decorating, to help with your home renovations projects.

You leafed through a few magazines and got inspired with some great interior design ideas and fantastic paint colours. You'd like to freshen up a room in your house, which has this super ugly wallpaper on the walls. Ok... so you've tried removing some of the ugly wallpaper and you've realised what a mammoth task it actually is (painting and decorating is not as easy as it looks!).

Now you're thinking........lets paint over it instead!

Before you get your house painting gear out, let's first check the state of the wall paper. You will have to make sure the wall paper is glued down well enough to paint over. Well...... we can fairly safely assume its well glued down, since you gave up on the wallpaper removal job. Either that, or you want to keep the painting and decorating to a minimum effort.

If the wallpaper is lifting away from the wall anywhere, then now is the time to glue it back down with some PVA or wallpaper glue. If it keeps curling away from the wall, you may need to tape or staple it down temporarily until the glue dries.

Next you need to roll the area with pigmented sealer to make sure you paper doesn't lift during painting and decorating. If there is already a coat of paint on the wallpaper, you can skip ithis step.
Apply the pigmented sealer. If the paper bubbles, don't panic straight away. Just wait untill the paper is dry, as often these bubbles go away by themselves. If there are lots of bubbles and they don't go away when dry,  I'm afraid you will just have to give up and strip the paper off the wall before painting and decorating. Or give us a call at Banks Building Maintenance to get a free quote on doing the painting and decorating for you. We have good house painter on the books.

Tip: Yes you should use the oil based sealer.

Next, plaster repair any holes or scratches you want to hide. This may not be easy due to textured paper, but get creative, you can hide lots under and good painting and decorating job. In your house painting kit you should have a few textured rollers to roll over fresh repairs to add texture.

If the wall is really bad you may consider a skim coat of plaster over the whole wall. I suggest you leave this up to your professional plasterer. Please give us a call at Banks Building Maintenance for a free quote.

Finally use a low sheen washable paint like Dulux Wash n Wear or Resene Space Coatto paint your wall.

Remember don't be too critical of your finished work. You will always see any tiny fault, because you are up close and personal with your latest house painting efforts.

Happy house painting
Andre