About Kumanomoto

We Are the Crew You Call After the Paper Comes Off

Kumanomoto works out of Willow St in the 90810 ZIP and paints houses across Long Beach. The work we get asked for by name is wallpaper removal, and more specifically the part that comes after it. A good number of our jobs start with a phone call from somebody who pulled a corner on a Saturday, watched a strip of gray board come away with it, and stopped.

That is the right instinct. Removal is not a difficult skill. Steam, a broad knife, patience and a willingness to change the wash water more often than seems necessary will get almost any paper off a wall. The difficulty is that the wall you are left with is whatever the original hanger left you, and you do not find out which one you have until the pattern is in a trash bag.

Why We Talk About the Substrate First

There are really only two outcomes. Either the wall was primed or sized before the paper went up, in which case the paste releases from the primer and the board underneath is intact, or it was not, in which case the paste has bonded directly to the paper facing of the drywall and that facing is coming off. The second case is common in anything papered from the late 1970s onward, when hanging straight onto new board became normal practice.

Nothing about technique changes that outcome. A slower, gentler strip on an unprimed wall does not save the facing, it just takes longer to arrive at the same place. So we open a test corner before quoting, look at what comes away, and price the room we actually have rather than the room anybody would prefer.

The Steps People Skip

Two of them, consistently. The first is the adhesive washdown. Wallpaper paste stays water soluble more or less forever, and anything applied over it, primer, compound or finish paint, is bonded to the paste rather than to the wall. It looks perfect for a few weeks and then crazes or lifts, usually in the first humid stretch. We wash until a dry hand run across the surface comes back with no tack, which is normally two passes and sometimes three.

The second is texture matching. A repair skimmed dead flat next to an orange peel wall is invisible in the store and obvious in the room. We spray or hand apply a sample, put it up in the same light, and only then commit to the wall.

Working in Houses People Live In

Most of these rooms are occupied. Steam is involved, water is involved, and sanding compound produces a very fine dust that travels through a home in an afternoon if it is not contained. Zippered doorways, covered floors, vacuum extraction on the sander and a proper clean-up at the end of each day. The rest of the house stays usable while we are in one room of it.

We work through Long Beach and the neighboring cities, mostly on the 1920s and 1930s bungalows around Belmont Heights and Rose Park, the mid-century homes in Bixby Knolls, and the post-war stucco tracts further east. Call (562) 867-4576 or come by 670 Willow St, Long Beach, CA 90810 to talk through what is on your walls.