Painting - just took off wallpaper HELP!!

hi, i am very new to this so bare with me please :) i just took off some wallpaper in my dining room using DIF. it worked great. wallpaper came off in huge sheets without scoring or anything. now the bad news (at least to me). when i took of the wallpaper i saw that there was a lot of hard white stuff on top of a brown background. i figured the white stuff was glue (which it is) and the brown stuff was paint. i wet the glue down with the DIF solution and started to scrape off the glue with a very flexiblt putty knife. BIG MISTAKE. what i thought was paint was the sheetrock. it started to peel away a few layers of the paper so i have a few different tones of brown on the wall. i know nothing about building so is this material actually sheetrock? is the brown paper a protective coating or something? i peeled off the first layer of that paper stuff in a few places and there is a darker shade brown paper underneath. i know this is not wallpaper because i see the nailheads everywhere. is this something where i can just do a little spackling and sanding, then prime and paint or did i shoot myself in the foot? and is this actually sheetrock or is it plaster? how does one tell the difference? i went back to the wall later on and saw that with hot water and elbow grease the glue comes off but still feels a bit tacky. is it bad to get most of the glue off and prime over the wall if it is still tacky or do i just keep wiping untill no tackiness is left? it only feels tack when it is wet. i am sorry this is so long but as you can tell i am lost. thank you in advance for any help you can give.

It seems as if you are down to the sheet rock and on the back side of it at that. It will be good to remove the rest of the wallpaper paste.

Nevertheless, let it dry and spackle (joint compound) oer the nail heads and other rough places, and sand. Next prime the wall. Evidently, that was not done. You may have to lightly sand the wall after the prime coat to cure fuzziness that may result from the sheet rock itself being wet. If so, apply another coat of primer. If the surface is smooth to your liking, then paint.

One difference is that plaster won't come off with water.

The only thing I would add, if I may, is if the drywall layers begin bubbling or lifting while spackling or mudding you may want to back off and prime first which should stop any lifting. There is no doubt you have drywall because plaster has no nail heads and doesn't remove in layers. Plaster is really more like a thin layer of concrete.....Mike

And make sure that for your primer, you use an interior oil based primer (cleans up with paint thinner or turpentine). Anything water based (latex) may cause problems at this point. Now your finish coat can be a latex paint - in fact, I recommend it.

This is just a guess here since I can't really see the wall.

It sounds like a diyer patched the wall or no one wanted to be bothered fixing the nail pops. It could also be the nail pops kept reappearing. Anyway, the h/o easy answer was to cover the wall with the heavy wallpaper liner used for such purposes. Its plain brown and is made to cover up texture, etc before hanging new paper. To make matters worse, the wall was not prepped properly, so you'll never get that paper off w/o damaging the wall.

When you removed the top layer of wall paper, you actually just removed the top and not the backer paper. Wallpaper is made of a texture front over a backer paper.

The glob of glue you found was the previous owners attempt at a patch.

Do use a primer first. Use an oil-based primer. Then top coat with the latex of your choice.