First, 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.
The Type of 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.
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.
Why You Need to Wash Your Walls TSP Before Painting
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.
The Best Way to Remove Wall Decals
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.
The Key to Removing Wall Decals
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.
Barry K. Brown has been in the Sign, Banner, Decal and Display Business for over 20 years. It isn't what he thought he'd do with his life, but he says he knows too much now to do anything else! He has been marketing these products online since 1998, and the company he was general manager of in 1998 was the first sign company to be listed on Yahoo!
