Powder Room Goes BIG and BOLD With COLOR

Enter another typically all-white-and-grey new home in suburbia – Towne Lake, Cypress (northwest Houston).

The homeowner, however, loves color, and is slowly adding her personality to the home. Starting with this powder room. You can’t get more fun than lime green and navy blue – with birds and flowers tossed in, too!

The wallpaper is called Giselle, and is by Thibaut, one of my favorite brands. The pattern has an unusually long 36″ repeat, and one photo shows me rolling it out on the floor to get a perspective before I start laying out the room.

Don’t Skip the Wallpaper Primer!

A primer is imperative for a good wallpaper installation – and I mean a primer designed to be used under wallpaper, not a generic primer or a paint primer.

A good primer will

seal porous surfaces
mitigate a glossy surface (paper won’t stick to gloss)
allow for “slip” and repositioning while installing the paper
provide “tooth” for the adhesive to grab ahold of
withstand the torque created when wallpaper dries and pulls taught,
preventing “popped seams”
protect the surface, making future removal of the paper easier while
preventing damage to the wall

Ultra Prime Pro 977 by Roman’s is my preferred primer.

But different situations call for different primers. When hanging on a thirsty surface like new drywall or a textured wall that has been skim-floated, I will use Gardz by Zinsser. Other primers could be called for in other situations.

Playful Jungle Animals for Baby Girl’s Nursery Accent Wall

No pink flowers or butterflies for this baby girl… Her parents chose a jungle-themed wallpaper pattern with cartoon-like animals and plants, in a predominately green colorway.

The pattern is called “Animal Kingdom” and is by Milton & King. It is a non-woven material, and I hung it by the paste-the-wall method.

Original painted wall
My preferred wallpaper primer
Fan to dry the primer faster
Initial strip hung alongside red line from laser level
Finished wall
Detail
Label

Balls on the Walls – Slight Pattern MisMatch

This slight pattern mismatch was not much of a big deal. From a distance you can’t even see it. I did use some pencil to touch up some of the darker balls, to disguise the mismatch for close-up viewing.

KILZ Stain Blocker to Cover Green Ink

See the green vertical line to the right of the paint can? The previous wallpaper installer probably had a little white wall showing at a seam, so used ink that matched the color of the wallpaper to disguise it.

Ink (along with other substances, like blood, rust, water stains, oil, tobacco, mildew, wood sap, and others) can bleed through joint compound, paint, and wallpaper. Sometimes it takes a few months or years.

So it’s important to discover these stains, and to treat them with a stain-blocking sealer. Water-borne products simply don’t work, no matter what the label claims. Shellac-based sealers like BIN are good. But I like KILZ Original, the oil-based version.

3-D “Rivet” Squares on Grasscloth in a Home Office

Phillip Jeffries’s “Rivets” pattern is popular and trendy. The wallpaper I hung today is Thibaut’s response to it.

Thibaut’s version offers the same texture and appeal of real natural fiber grasscloth, as well as three-dimensional squares that unite to form larger squares.

Thibaut’s version Union Square is better because:

1.) Less expensive

2.) Better color consistency (fewer paneling and shading issues)

3.) Squares form a more muted secondary pattern, so it’s much easier to live with (the pattern doesn’t hit you in the eye every time you look at a wall)

4.) Squares are positioned on the strips so the installer can easily manipulate the pattern to accommodate un-plumb walls and un-level ceilings.

5.) For similar reasons, the installer can “tweak” the design a bit to ensure favorable placement of the squares (to eliminate having to cut through any of the squares, or bend them around a corner). Read below.

6.) When it’s unavoidable to have to cut through the squares, the Thibaut 3-D material is much easier to get through with a blade or scissors than the PJ or the Schumacher products.

7.) The bolts are marked in the order they came off the printing press (see photo), so you can hang strips sequentially, to minimize shading and paneling (do a search here on those terms).

8.) Thibaut provides clear tips on how to work with natural materials and what to expect with the finished outcome.

9.) Thibaut offers to replace material lost to working around defects, and they will also reimburse an installer for (part) of his labor, if a product is defective.

10.) Other points which are escaping me right now. But suffice it to say, despite its grand reputation, Phillip Jeffries products are often extremely difficult to install, and disappointing in appearance, and customer service is basically, “We never had this problem before – it must be the installer’s fault.”

Thibaut, on the other hand, researches what it takes to make a good product, does test hangs, and, if there is a problem, Thibaut actually listens to feedback from us installers.

In the window photo, I did some tweaking to get the rivets to line up exactly over the middle of the window. It took some further tweaking to position the squares so they would march down either side of the window at the same distance from the edge.

How did I accomplish that? After much measuring and plotting and a few practice strips, I widened the distance between two sets of squares over the center of the window – by a full inch. 4.5″ instead of 3.5″ is a big difference, yet it is barely noticeable. What is more important is that the squares going down either side of the window are all 3/4″ from the edge.

This home is in the Briar Park neighborhood of Houston – interestingly enough, right next door to another home I papered a year or so ago, and a block away from another home I where I hung paper in the powder room and have more bathrooms to paper coming up … In fact, I have put wallpaper in a whole lot of homes in this one tiny neighborhood. Near Beltway 8 / Sam Houston Tollway and Briar Forest.

The interior designer is Layne Ogden of Layne Torsch Interiors.

Another Shot of Yesterday’s Woven Grasscloth Install

Textured Woven Grasscloth in Home Bar Area

This new home in the Briarpark neighborhood of west Houston is spacious and light, with floor-to-ceiling windows, white walls and neutral-colored floors and furnishings.

Like many young families, the homeowners were looking for texture, rather than pattern, to warm up their home bar area. Layne Ogden, of Layne Torsch Interiors, found them this 2-tone, basket-weave sort of grasscloth pattern by Thibaut.

Seams are a little less noticeable on this woven grasscloth, but buyers should still be aware that ANY “natural” product presents the possibility of mis-matched seams, shading and paneling, as well as being easily stained, or even targeted by cats or dogs who want something to dig into.

To help reduce the instances of paneling, Thibaut has labeled their bolts in the order they came off the manufacturing line. The idea is that if you place strips that were dyed at the same time next to one another, it will minimize any possible color differences as you move through the printing batch numbers.

The only weird thing for today’s project is … how did it happen that there are TWO bolts numbered #12? ?? AND … what’s up with that one bolt that has no label or wrapper of its own?

The two bolts of #12 I can deal with. But the unwrapped bolt I am afraid to work with. It is undoubtedly a return from gawd-knows-whom-or-when, and it’s impossible to know what run or batch it’s in.

So I’m ahopin’ that I will be able to pull enough tricks out of my hat to paper the room without having to use this bolt.

Problem With Wall – Unstable Paint

Here’s where a little bit of paint has peeled away from the wall. Why? Most likely because over the 60 year lifetime of this house, various products have been applied to the walls.

Oil based paint, followed by latex paint, then gloss paint, maybe some smoothing compound, then more paint and then another coat of paint.

In all probability, improper prep, or, more likely, no prep at all, was done between all these surface treatments.

The thing is, all of these disparate materials are not likely to stick to one another, especially if no prep has been done.

The problem becomes, then, that when a new surface treatment (paint, wallpaper) is applied, and then dries, which results in shrinking, which results in pulling taught and putting stress on the wall’s surface, the stress can cause these various surfaces to actually pull apart (delaminate).

That’s what you’re seeing here.

Flaw of the Day – Creases and Krinkles

I don’t encounter nearly as many defects in wallpaper as I did even a few years ago. But today, and with one of my favorite brands, I ran into a few problems that cost us some paper.

These creases have actually damaged the surface of the paper, and will not flatten out as the paper dries. While they are relatively minor, they are noticeable enough that they would mar the look on the wall. When people have a nice home, and they’ve spent a lot of money on their decorating project, I think they should have everything as perfect as possible.

So I rejected all the areas that had these creases. That meant that we lost a couple of full-height strips. Good thing that I usually have my clients order a bit of extra paper. So there was enough to finish the power room.

Interestingly enough, this same defect popped up when I hung this same pattern a few months earlier. I am friends with the customer service rep for this manufacturer, and I reported these incidents to him; his company is very customer-oriented. I hope they are able to rectify this problem.