How to remove decals from your walls without damaging the paint.
Question: What is the best way to remove a decal from my wall?
I’ve addressed this topic in the past, but it’s a good question and one I’m happy to answer again so you don’t have to try to find the answer in a past article, because, as we all know, the internet is a black hole time sucker.
First, although you didn’t specifically ask this question, let me say what I hope to be the case, and that is that you painted your own walls prior to apply the wall decals or stickers, and not only that, that you did it the right way, which I will explain now.
1. Consider the Wall Paint
The paint that you put on your walls may have come from a large box home improvement store or from a specialty paint store, but for the most part, interior paint is interior paint, and the quality was most likely good if you were also able to afford wall stickers.
So, assuming the paint is good, and that you were painting over another coat of paint, and not new walls, which require a good primer coat before you paint a finish coat, it is my hope that you cleaned the walls thoroughly with a trisodium phosphate solution. Trisodium phosphate, or TSP, is a wall and ceiling cleaning agent used by most professional painters and it will strip the dirt and grease off your interior walls and ceilings.
2. Thoroughly clean the walls before painting.
This is very important when it comes to a secondary coat of paint, because, like you, your house breathes. If it is an older house particularly, the exchange of air may happen in as few as five minutes, though even in newer homes, the exchange may be 15 to 20 minutes due to the “breathing” your home does.
In this breathing process, your house sucks in the same air you do from the outside air, although some of the nasty stuff gets filtered out in your air conditioning unit or your furnace filtration system, but a lot of it floats through your house and sticks to your walls. When this happens, over time, it creates a surface that doesn’t hold paint as well as you’d like it to.
So, that’s why you need to wash the walls with TSP before you paint.
Assuming, now, that you did that step before you painted, and that you did the painting, you can feel secure with your wall stickers being removable without bringing half of your last paint job with the adhesive on the stickers. If you didn’t, you may want to say a prayer and hope the person or company that did the painting did the job correctly.
3. Use heat as you remove the wall decal off.
Now, on to your actual question about removing the wall decals. The best way to get wall decals, or most any other decals, off is to use a bit of heat as you peel the sticker. A hair dryer on high heat setting or a heat gun on low heat setting should help the glue release easily. You need to be very careful, though, not to get the wall behind the sticker too hot, or the paint may release no matter how good it is.
4. Go slow and be careful not to overheat.
The key here is to go slowly and carefully and not to overheat the wall. Your wall decals should be easily removed if you follow this procedure, and you have a good paint job, you should successfully be able to remove them without removing the paint at the same time, which is the goal.
If you’re interested to learn more about decals and stickers designed as wall graphics, visit here: Large Vinyl Decals and Stickers
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading...Popular Posts:
