Don’t Let Your Toddler Handle a Sharpie!

So the little girl was innocently playing with an ink Sharpie, and, well, the wall along the bottom of the stairway just happened to get marked up. (Unfortunately, my “before’ photo got lost somewhere.) This is very expensive wallpaper, and, unfortunately, was the first thing you see when you enter this West University home.

I was there to hang paper in the nearby powder room. But every time I walked past this stairwell, the ink marks just kept bothering me.

So, with the homeowners’ go-ahead, I decided to fix it.

First, we checked to be sure there was enough left-over wallpaper. Thank goodness for boxes stashed in the garage apartment!

I didn’t want to strip off the original wallpaper, for fear of scoring the wall and causing seams to lift. So the original wallpaper was left intact.

Then the ink had to be covered with a stain blocker, to prevent them from bleeding through the new wallpaper. I used oil-based KILZ Original. Two coats.

Next, because wallpaper paste will no longer stick to oil-based products, (due to EPA-required changes to the formulas), I primed the whole area with Gardz.

Because it’s not a good idea to have a seam fall on top of a seam, at this time, I placed a strip of seam tape (special stuff made by a colleague of mine) so that it bridged the gap between the two seams of the original wallpaper. The Gardz sealer / primer melded everything together.

Then I took the left-over wallpaper and found the corresponding pattern to match the pattern on the wall. I used a scissors to cut around this design. Because this repair fell on a seam, it required two strips of paper, one on either side of the seam.

Then I pasted the wallpaper patches, allowed to book and sit, then appliquéd them to the wall.

I was surprised at how stretchy and wrinkly the wet wallpaper was. I was glad that I was only doing two 18” high patches – I felt sorry for the guy who had hung a whole 2-story staircase and hallway of this stuff.

Bottom line – the finished patch looked fantastic. You could not tell that there had been any errant marks on the wall.

Here is a link to the wallpaper pattern. It is called Zumba ZigZag. https://www.fschumacher.com/item/5003300

Tags: case, gardz, ink, KILZ, powder room, schumacher, Sharpie, stain blocker, stair, wallpaper, way, west u, zigzag, zumba