Home Improvement Help (wallpaper removal and need Roto Zip or router)

[twopu]

Now that I have some time off from work my wife and I would like to work on the house. We are looking to remove wallpaper from the kitchen, install new baseboards, door, and tile.

I have no idea how long the wallpaper has been up so what do you recommend for removal, steaming or an enzyme based remover (Zinsser). After reading a post on her message boards, my wife is a afraid the scoring tool will damage the walls and that steaming is the only way to go. I've tried steaming at my mothers house with very little success but that could be due to a crappy steamer.

I also need to install doors. I saw several different drilling kits to install the door handle/lock, but they seem to be the same except for a few adapters. Any particular brand I should use?

How do you install the door hinge? My father in law used his router but after checking them out they are not cheap. I wanted to buy a versatile tool like the Roto Zip to make small cuts in tile and baseboard. Would it work for doing the door hinges?

Thanks

[Autoeng]

We have removed a lot of wallpaper with a scorer and had no damage. Used a mix of fabric softener with water and it just peeled off. I would be more concerned with the damage that steaming would do to the paper on drywall than the scorer.

You can cut door hinge recesses with a good wood chisel but nothing comes close to the ease and accuracy of the router and jig. I don't think you would be able to accurately control a Rotozip in wood unless it was hardwood. You could buy one and try it in some soft pine scraps and if it doesn't work out just return it. I would say that a Dremel tool would be a better alternative to the Rotozip because of the multitude of bits they have to support their product.

If you are handy you could make your own router hinge jig and then just buy the cheapest router you can find. You do not need a plunge router, only one with a guide collar. This is the route that I would personally go.

[Eliot Ness]

Originally Posted by Autoeng

We have removed a lot of wallpaper with a scorer and had no damage. Used a mix of fabric softener with water and it just peeled off. I would be more concerned with the damage that steaming would do to the paper on drywall than the scorer......

We've had the same experience.... no damage using a scorer. The only problems I ran into was at our old house (the money pit) where someone put up paper on bare drywall (no paint or primer) in a bathroom years before. Even a steamer wasn't too much help on that project..... I remember doing a lot of drywall patching before that project was finished.

[kompressornsc]

To do door hinges and locksets, pick up a door kit (Irwin makes one). It will have all the jigs, as well as a 'router' bit that fits in a drill (and rides on the jigs) to do the outlines of the lockset & hinges. Then you simply chisel out to the edges that are already the correct depth / size. It will also have a hole saw to do both holes.
Here's the Irwin one:

Irwin Door Install Kit

[Autoeng]

Originally Posted by kompressornsc

To do door hinges and locksets, pick up a door kit (Irwin makes one). It will have all the jigs, as well as a 'router' bit that fits in a drill (and rides on the jigs) to do the outlines of the lockset & hinges. Then you simply chisel out to the edges that are already the correct depth / size. It will also have a hole saw to do both holes.
Here's the Irwin one:

Irwin Door Install Kit

It doesn't do hinge recesses only installation of the lockset.

[Grimm]

Originally Posted by Eliot Ness

We've had the same experience.... no damage using a scorer. The only problems I ran into was at our old house (the money pit) where someone put up paper on bare drywall (no paint or primer) in a bathroom years before. Even a steamer wasn't too much help on that project..... I remember doing a lot of drywall patching before that project was finished.

I think we may have had the same experience on our dining room wall when we got our house a few years back. It had a chair railing with wallpaper on the upper portion. My wife's friend got a little overzealous removing the wallpaper, and the drywall paper came off with it on about 50% of the wall. I probably should have tried patching it (I was new to all the home improvement stuff) but instead I just used about 8-10 coats of paint, sanding the high spots with an electric sander in between coats. It actually came out pretty nice. It's probably one of the smoothest walls in the house.

[Autoeng]

If "sizing" wasn't applied to the drywall before the wallpaper was hung then you take a big risk of this happening. Basically, sizing forms a barrier between the wall and the wallpaper paste so that the wall isn't damaged when the wallpaper is removed.