Removing mounting tape from your walls

Most of the frames in our house are hung on the walls using double-sided mounting tape.

bought this in National Bookstore for P30

This is mainly because of these reasons:

1. I'm scared and don't know how to use the electric drill

2. Hubby hates drilling holes in our walls so useless to ask him for help (well, he did drill some bathroom stuff for me once after I begged him to!)

3. I have a lot of frames and wanted the option of removing or rearranging them later on without having to deal with holes in the wall

Well, all those frames I've put up the past couple of years have remained untouched, until recently when I updated our family silhouette art. I was nervous since I didn't have a good experience in taking off those adhesive hooks before, which also used the same type of tape. The tape in one hook ripped the paint off my wall when I removed it. :(

Anyway, after all this, I now know that mounting tape is super strong stuff! When they say heavy duty, they mean it! And the thing is, I used quite a lot because I was afraid of the frames falling and breaking later on (none ever did). Now I'm learning the hard way. It was a pain to remove! The frames really wouldn't budge no matter how hard I tugged on them. 

What I finally did was to get a knife and tried to slice carefully through the tape. It was challenging since I didn't want to destroy the walls by peeling off whole chunks of paint which would have been much worse than drilling a hole in the first place. Plus I really needed to put some force for the knife to cut through the adhesive. It did work but there was a lot of stuff left on the walls.

At first I thought I had definitely damaged the wall, but it was all just leftover tape. I ended up peeling what I could little by little (because it does come off naman). It wasn't easy though and my hands and fingers were so sore after a while...

I asked hubby for help and what he did was put baby oil on the remaining adhesive to soften it up. Then he used an old toothbrush to scrape off what was left and finally a washcloth to scrub and clean everything up. And it worked! It took a bit of effort but the walls were damage free, aside from a bit of discoloration from where the frames used to be.

yey good as new! :)

So the question is, did I use mounting tape again considering how hard it was to remove? 

YES, I DID. ;p

But this time, I used less and only on the sides, not anymore in the middle (since that was the hardest part to remove with the knife). The main thing for me was that mounting tape does its job of hanging the frames and even though can be a pain to remove, at least no holes in my walls!