Liner

     If your walls are so rough that patching and sanding would comprise a tremendous amount of work, then liner is your best alternative. Liner comes in light and heavy grades for everything from cracked plaster to concrete blocks. There are even prepasted liners.

     Liner is most commonly used over paneling. Most paneling can be covered with a heavy-duty liner without having to fill the grooves with spackling compound. Of course, even liner has it's limits. Bulges and bows in the walls will not disappear and very wide paneling gaps may have to be filled if your finish paper is a thin product. Real wood paneling with the wide "V" grooves may require spackling to keep the paper from sinking in.

     Before installing your liner clean the oils and waxes off the paneling, sand with 100 grit sandpaper, prime with top quality primer (allowing a day or two of drying time), and size with a ready-mixed acrylic sizing (allow overnight drying). The priming and drying times are critical for some wallcoverings that will pull away from a low tack surface as they dry.

     Install your heavy-duty (bridging) liner with a ready-mixed, heavy-duty vinyl adhesive. Allow this to dry overnight and then size the liner with a top-quality, ready-mixed acrylic sizing. Most bridging liners are so porous that they must be sized to get your wallcovering to adhere to them.

     If this seems like a lot of prep work, you're right---it is. The alternative is adhesion failure. If you think it costs a lot to do this much work to change the look of the room, compare it to the cost of taking out the paneling, installing new or repairing the old sheetrock (which should be primed and sized anyway), and you can see that the only cheaper alternative is to just paint the paneling. We all know how attractive that is.

     Frequently, liner is rolled very tight. You can take out some of the force of this curl by reverse-rolling the liner in the opposite direction. Leave the liner reverse-rolled and let it set for at least an hour. This will relax the tension of the curl and make the product easier to handle on the wall.