Three months ago my mother & I moved into this quaint 1943 cottage in the historic district. Every wall AND ceiling in the house had been covered with 3+ layers of wallpaper & then painted. That was the first big project-first scraping paint, & then steaming wallpaper. When I finally got down to the bare plaster, the man who had hung the wallpaper had signed the wall, Jan 5, 1936! I taped and mudded the corners and patched all the nail holes. One coat of primer/sealer and two coats of paint took my mother's bedroom from a deep, dark pink to a very pale aloe mist.
I next moved to what was to be my bedroom, scraping the bright orange paint & steaming 3 layers of wallpaper from the ceiling and walls. This room got the necessary prep work and then two coats of the color oat bran.
Next I did the hallway between the bedrooms, but to this day is still not primed or painted because I was running out of time - we were moving in soon and I still had the living room and dining room to do.
The living room had been painted a dark teal blue over 3 layers of wallpaper, one of them VERY thick, and several borders around the top. This room was the size of the 2 bedrooms put together but I stuck at it, although I uncovered an area on the ceiling that required professional patching so I actually finished painting this room a few days after we moved in. I liked the look of the pale green in the bedroom so much that I used this same color in the living room also.
Well, we were moved in-lock, stock, & barrel, so to speak, & everything that didn't have a place was in the dining room. I had worked late into the night on the day before we moved but still was only able to finish steaming the wallpaper off of half the room so that was finished a couple of weeks after move in - far from an ideal situation. I painted the dining room a very pale yellow called champagne tickle.
Steaming is not only a hot job (9' ceilings in 95-100 degree weather), but it's very messy & stinky too. I wish I would have counted how many of the big black garbage bags full of wallpaper & paint I hauled out - hundreds of pounds worth, at least.
This cottage is now light & bright and along with the bags of old wallpaper went the "old house" smell.