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• Walls should be clean, dry and sound. You can paper directly over painted surfaces so long as you have washed them thoroughly with sugar soap.
  
• Remove peeling or damaged wallpaper. Stripping wallpaper is a messy job so take up carpets or cover them with dust sheets. Take all the furniture out of the room or group it together in the middle of the floor and protect it with more dust sheets
  
• Use warm soapy water (or water and a proprietary paper stripper) to soften old absorbent wall-coverings, then use a wide stripping knife to scrape the paper off the wall. A steam-generating wallpaper stripper makes the job even easier.
  
• When removing painted wallpapers or washable wall-coverings, scratch the surface with a wallpaper scorer to enable the moisture to penetrate.
  
• You can peel vinyl all-coverings off the wall, leaving the backing paper behind. If it is sound, just paper over the backing, or strip it like ordinary wallpaper.
  
• Repair damaged plaster with a fine surface filler. Rake looses material from deep cracks and holes, then pack filler into all the crevices, using a flexible filler knife.
  
• When the filler is dry, sand it smooth with medium-grade abrasive paper.
  
• Size newly plastered walls with a proprietary size or diluted wallpaper paste to ensure the paper will adhere.