Nifty, Fishy Kill Point Disguise

When you wallpaper a room, you work your way around the room, until the last strip meets up with the first strip. This is usually placed in an inconspicuous corner or behind a door, because in this last corner, the pattern will not match.

This large powder room did not have any “inconspicuous” corners. Any mis-match of the pattern in a corner would be very obvious. So I chose to put this last mis-matched junction above the door. The wall area over the door was only 12″ high, which helped.

In the top photo, the first strip is on the left, and the last strip has come around from the right. The pattern motif that ended up in this spot just happens to be the same on both the left and the right strips. The problem is that there is a 1″ gap between the two strips.

To bridge this gap, and to disguise the resulting pattern mis-match, I took a scrap of paper that would match the pattern coming from the right side. (Note, this would not work coming from the other direction, because the koi fish would be harder to alter in a pleasing way.) I trimmed along the design in an irregular line. See second photo.

When I butted this against the existing strip to its left, the pattern matched at the seam. The irregular cuts that I made along the pattern meshed with the design on the strip to the right. It’s not a perfect match, but it’s enough to fool the eye, and from the floor, no one would notice. See the last photo.

And it’s a heck of a lot better than having the pattern down a whole 8′ corner not match.

Tags: disguise, inconspicuous, mis-match, not match, pattern mis-match, room, scrap, wallpaper