...usually, not all of it.

I've done this shit quite a few times before -- we moved around a lot when I was a kid, usually into old slightly run-down apartments or houses -- but then, of course, only as a "handyman"; the main helper to my Dad, who was the "master craftsman".

Back then, the old wallpaper was usually actual ordinary flat paper (like the ones we put up). On that, you can just put new wallpaper right over the old -- why would you want to take it off for? (Oh, sure, it robs you of some space... Is that what you mean? Like, put up a few hundred layers, and before you know it your room will be an inch or two smaller! :-)

And nowadays, these slightly structured surfaces they often have are made of some other material -- either some vinyl-type plastic, or a different kind of paper laminated on -- so they're "splittable": Wet them with a sponge, fiddle around[*] so you get a hold of only the top layer, and then you can easily pull that off in great big swathes, often the whole width of the wallpaper at once, leaving the backing paper as a nice clean perfect surface to put new wallpaper on (OK: or to paint). No prob, really[+].

Probably a lot cheaper than fabric, too.


[*]: Hurt my thumb that way, though: The easiest and best way, I thought at first, of "fiddling around" was to *rub* the (wet) surface with the ball of my thumb... I thought, until it turned out it was just as easy to rub off the top layer of *the skin of my thumb* that way! :-/ And not *just* the top layer, either: Turned out you just can't not use your thumb, so the *next* (and much thicker) layer went, too... And *that* REALLY hurt! :-(

[+]: Well... "No prob", *once you find out* that that's the way it works. Which, in my case, was only *after* I'd ripped my way through four layers of old wallpaper; in a couple patches, all the way down to bare concrete. :-( ... Oh well -- main thing is, I *did* find it out, so I only had to gob on filler and sand down (and gob on some more filler and sand it down again) on one single wall (in the bedroom), after having pretty much ruined it. But once you know the trick, it really is a piece of cake.