If you mention “wallpaper removal” to most people, they usually make a face like they’ve smelled a week-old bag of forgotten gym clothes. A trip to the dentist seems more fun than facing e a roomful of old wallpaper that needs to come down. You want an easy answer, I’ll bet? You think the professional wallpaper strippers have some hidden secret that makes the paper fall off right at your feet? Sorry to burst your bubble. Stripping wallpaper is a lot of work, no matter how you slice it. But the method I give you here is the easiest and fastest way I’ve found to do a job that kind of sucks. Just a note: This isn’t the final word on wallpaper removal. You can find other methods, and hey, they may be better. But this method works for us. The materials you will need are: a scoring tool, sometimes known as a Paper Tiger. This little dandy has wheels of sharp teeth for perforating the surface of the wallpaper. A pump-up garden sprayer: the kind used for spraying weeds in the garden. (If you don’t have a sprayer you can use a sponge and a bucket of water.) Lots of towels or cloth drop-cloths to soak up excess water. 2 buckets (3 if you’re not using a sprayer). A putty knife 3” or 6” wide. Ivory dish washing soap. Fabric softener. Green Scotchbrite pads. A good-sized sponge (2 if you’re still without a sprayer). 2” masking tape: the cheap stuff that’s really sticky: don’t use blue painter’s tape. Large plastic trash bags, and a step ladder. Begin by testing a small piece of wallpaper. Use a putty knife to lift a seam and pull the paper away from the wall. If you get a large piece to come loose, leaving the backing still stuck to the wall, it is probably “strippable” wallpaper. Be grateful, because your day just got a whole lot easier. Strippable wallpaper is made so that the vinyl on the top will pull away in large sheets, leaving the backing to be relatively easy to wet down and remove. 
If your test only gets you a small piece of wallpaper grab the Paper Tiger and get busy scoring the paper. Score it a lot. Go in circles. Then go up and down in the corners and along the trim. Go back and forth along the ceiling and baseboard.
Warning: This is is not the place to test how strong you are!
Use a light touch with the Paper Tiger. You only want to score the top of the wallpaper. You don’t want to go through the paper and cut up your wall board.
Don’t skimp on the scoring. If you could pick one or two square inches at random and find it scored, that’s about enough. Put down drop-cloths or towels next to the wall you want to start on. Take your 2″ masking tape and tape it to the wallpaper an inch above your baseboard. Make a “drip edge” so that water drips over the baseboard. You want to try to keep the water from running behind the baseboard. You don’t want your baseboard to get wet and curl like a potato chip. Fill the sprayer with hot water and add one cap of fabric softener per gallon of water. Do this in a bucket if you don’t have a sprayer. You can also use a chemical stripper such as DIF. If you use a chemical stripper you can add a tablespoon of fabric softener. It makes the water “wetter.” 
Wet down 3 strips of wallpaper. A fine spray of water is better. And if you’re using a bucke tay on the wall as long as possible and soak into the perforations made by the Paper Tiger.t and sponge, don’t have the sponge dripping wet. You want the water on the wall, not the floor. You also want the water to s If you are a type-A personality, this part will be difficult, but now you wait for 5 minutes. Now would be a good time to fill the two buckets with warm water. In one bucket, squirt some Ivory dish washing soap. Get a green Scotchbrite pad and put in that bucket. Get your sponge and drop it in the second bucket. Use the sprayer or sponge and wet down the 3 strips of wallpaper again. Wait another 5 minutes. You may have to wet the wall more often if it starts to dry out too quickly, but keep it damp for at least 10 minutes before you try to take down any paper. 
Starting at the top of the first sheet, take the putty knife and pry up a corner and pull. Most likely the top of the paper will pull free and leave the backing. The backing will likely still be mostly dry except where your Don’t start doing a happy dance once the paper and the backing are off the wall. You’re not done here yet. You’ve got glue still on the wall. Yes, you have to get it off. No, you can’t just paint over it. Wallpaper glue will crackle and stain your paint. Besides it dries into crunchy globs that will look terrible. Paper Tiger scored the top of the wallpaper, so wet this section down again and wait another 5 minutes. Now go to work to get all the pieces of the first sheet off the wall. It may come off in a full sheet or in pieces, but keep at it. Use more water as needed to keep the paper from drying out. Don’t forget to keep the next 2 strips of wallpaper wet as well. And you can go ahead and wet down the next 2 strips beyond them too. 
If there is a lot of glue, scrape as much as possible off with a putty knife. (You can scrape the excess glue into a large yogurt container or wipe it on the just-removed sheet of wallpaper.) Now grab your bucket with the Scotchbrite and Ivory detergent and start at the top scrubbing down the wall. Wait! Do it gently. You want to scrub the glue off and not the top layer of sheet rock. Now, grab the sponge from the bucket of clear water and squeeze it out so it’s damp, Wipe back and forth down the wall you just scrubbed. You will probably want to rinse the sponge out halfway down the wall. Remembe r, you want to remove the glue not smear it around. Also, you will probably want to change water in your rinse bucket about every 4 of 5 strips, depending on how much glue is on the wall. 
Put the paper in a trash bag and grab the sprayer. Wet down the 4 strips again and start removing the next one in line. As you work around the room, keep wetting strips ahead so that they soak for about 15 minutes before you start removing them. Wallpaper manufacturers use various formulas for their glue. If it appears that fabric softener isn’t working well, you can try using Ivory dishwashing soap instead. Don’t, however, use both of them at once in your sprayer. They just don’t have the right chemistry to be compatible together. If neither one of the Well, there you have it. It still is hard work to get that darned stuff off the wall, but I’ve always been told that such things build character and help develop patience.
Now you aren’t planning on putting wallpaper back up on those walls are you?
Footnote:
I wrote this with the assumption that the walls were properly sized before the paper was installed. Sadly, some paper hangers were too lazy or ignorant to do the job right and installed the wallpaper right on raw sheet rock. There’s no way to remove the paper, in this case, without damaging the drywall.
If you find yourself with wallpaper installed over un-sized sheet rock, the above-described method is still the best way to get the wallpaper off. Just use the least amount of water you can to still do the job. There is a product made by Zinsser called Gardz. It’s a watery, clear sealer that will seal the damaged paper of your drywall back down so you can skim it with drywall mud and get back to a smooth wall.