This is a powder room off a TV / game / great room in the home of a family with school-aged kids. They had just done updates to the room (built in shelving and TV niche, carpet, pool table, huge snuggly sofa), to make it a family hang-out spot. The small adjoining powder room got an update with tile on the sink wall.
What a dramatic and shockingly fun wallpaper design! – This is called Acquario, and is in the Fornasetti collection by Cole & Son. I just call it “the Puffer Fish.”
Wallpaper shrinks as its paste dries, and so you can expect to see teeny gaps at the seams. This is normal. But since this wallpaper is dark, the white edges of the substrate, as well as even a minute bit of the wall under the seams, might be more prominent as the dark paper dries and shrinks.
In the top “before” photo, you see where I have used diluted craft paint to run a dark stripe along the wall where the wallpaper seam will fall. This, along with having colored the edges of the wallpaper strips with near-black chalk, pretty much eliminated any visible gaps at the seams.
This small powder room took me nearly 12 hours – to smooth the textured walls, prime, and hang the 6 single rolls (3 double roll bolts) of wallpaper.
The home is in the Pasadena area of south Houston.
A toile is a sort of pen-and-ink drawing in one color. It’s a very classic look, and usually includes depictions of life in a by-gone era -although you can find toiles with nautical, fairy tale, animal, and many other themes.
This toile is from the Waverly line. I hung lots and lots of Waverly back in the ’90’s. Today, virtually none of it is available. This particular design has been discontinued.
The homeowners had this exact same wallpaper pattern in three of their former homes. They wanted it in their current home, too. Through thorough sleuthing, the homeowner was able to track down a stash of this pattern. He was able to access it through Sarah at Southwestern Paint on Bissonnet near Kirby.
The toile is by York, in their SureStrip line, one of my favorites. It is pre-pasted, and is designed to strip off the wall easily when it’s time to redecorate.
The powder room was more than a little wonky, with a wavy ceiling line and un-plumb corners. A pattern like this is forgiving, because its so busy and “scratchy” that you don’t notice if some of the motifs are going a little off-track as they move around the room.
The home is in the Cinco Ranch subdivision of Katy in far west Houston.
This small powder room in the Rice University neighborhood of Houston was buried under at least four layers of old wallpaper. The homeowners intended to DIY new wallpaper. In the top photo, they have partially removed some of the layers. But not too far into the project they realized that the prep required was over their heads. Enter the Wallpaper Lady. 🙂
I won’t go into all the details of getting these walls into shape. But I will say that it took a day and a half, and I wasn’t completely satisfied with the end result. But sometimes you can’t surmount what was done over prior decades. I brought the wall to a good state for hanging the new paper.
And what a perfect choice they made! The original wallpaper was a beige faux-finish sort of design that was popular in the ’90’s. The couple wasn’t sure what they wanted, but, on our initial consultation, I showed them a sample of this that I had hung previously https://wallpaperlady.wordpress.com/2019/03/02/birds-on-black-wallpaper-by-witch-and-watchman/ , and they were instantly mesmerized. On the company’s website, they zeroed in on a slightly different pattern with equal drama.
The wallpaper is on a non-woven substrate, and can be hung via the paste-the-wall method. In bathrooms, with sinks and toilets and windows and other things to cut around, I find it better to paste the paper. It went up nicely, and should perform well for years, even being more resistant to splashes and stains than many papers. The non-woven substrate should resist curling at the seams caused by humidity – important, since this 100 year old home has no A/C vent in the powder room.
This newish home in the Houston Heights is pretty much all white. The master bath had some grey tones, including beautiful Carrara marble. The homeowner wanted to liven things up, as well as interject a bit of blue – a favored color.
The result is this, on one accent wall over the vanity. Two oval mirrors will hang on the wall.
The wallpaper is by Graham & Brown. It is a non-woven material, and I hung it via the paste-the-wal method.
The lady of the house likes glitter and bling, but didn’t want to over do it in the dining room. She also didn’t want anything too rigid or precise.
This rather scratchy, indistinct damask by York works perfectly. There’s a bit of glitter, but not overwhelming, plus a light texture that adds a pleasing effect.
This is a non-woven material, and so could be hung using the paste-the-wall method, which works nicely for an accent / feature wall like this.
In the last photo, you see me measuring off the strips, rolling them backwards (to prevent the surface from bopping into the pasted wall), and lining them up in the order they will be hung on the wall. Because I pasted the wall, there was no need for me to haul in my big work / pasting table. The PTW method is also very clean, because pastes goes on the wall only, so no messy wet scraps and no need to wipe paste off the woodwork.
Mirrors are commonly attached to walls with mastic – a sort of tar adhesive. When installing this new mirror, the workmen got some of the tar smeared on the wall below.
This is bad. Tar, like many other substances, will bleed through paint and wallpaper.
So this stain will need to be sealed over with a stain blocker. Or, better, cut out of the wall entirely, and then the damaged wall will have to be repaired. Learn more on this by doing a Search in the upper right corner.
Like most wallpapers, this Sure Strip by York can be expected to expand a bit when it becomes wet with the paste. Once it’s on the wall, it will dry and give up moisture – and that results in a tad of shrinkage. That usually means you might see just a teeny bit of a gap at the seams.
Not usually a big deal. But when you have a dark or bold color such as this on a light background and also printed on a white backing, if the paper shrinks and gaps, you can end up with a hairline’s breadth of the underlying wall surface and / or of the white wallpaper substrate showing through.
Layman’s terms: You might have a slight white line showing at the seams.
To help ward this off, I did two things. One was that I used red chalk to lightly color the edges of the wallpaper. Sorry, I forgot to take a picture, but you can Search here to see previous jobs where I employed that method.
The other thing was to stripe red paint under where the seams would fall.
This is a bit more complicated than it sounds. Because wallpaper will stretch when it gets wet with paste, making it difficult to guestimate exactly where the seam will fall, and thus where to run your red stripe.
Once you plot that out, you need a level to guide you by creating a plumb line at the appropriate point. And then mix your paint with water and use a brush or small sponge to run along that plumb line, straddling it widely enough to catch the seam wherever the gap might end up actually falling.
Also, the red paint needs to be good and dry before you put wallpaper on top of it. So this means you run the red stripe down the wall, and then get fans or a heat gun, or employ some other method to get the paint to dry quickly.
Oh, and … wallpaper works best when it’s hung on a wallpaper primer. Primers specific to wallpaper are designed to resist the tension created when wet wallpaper dries and shrinks a tad, putting stress on the seam area.
By running paint on the wall along the seam line, now you’ve covered up the wallpaper primer. There is no way to know if that perfectly pigmented craft store paint will hold up over the long run and keep the wallpaper seams tight to the wall.
That’s one reason I used a fairly light mix of the paint. A full-strength concentration of red paint might not allow the wallpaper paste to grip onto it. And definitely do not use a glossy paint. Nothing sticks to gloss.
As you can guess, this process adds a significant amount of time to your install. But it’s worth it, because, in the red room I hung pictured in previous posts, the seams were virtually invisible. I know that if I had not colored the edges of the paper as well as the wall, white would have shown just a teensy bit at the seams.
This wall had a slight texture that needed to be skim-floated and then sanded smooth. After I applied the smoothing compound (drywall joint compound), a half hour or so later, these tiny blister bubbles appeared. This is off-gassing. But from what is a mystery.
The only clue is that this area is around where the hand towel was positioned next to the sink. So this area would have received a lot of splashing of water and also soap and other toiletries.
My guess is that some of these substances stuck to the wall. And for whatever reason, when they were covered by the joint compound, they released air / gas, which caused these bubbles.
I’ve seen this before. But this time, some of the bubbles were large enough that they did not sand down smooth and even with the wall surface. So I had to do a light touch-up skim-coat on top.
Once I got the wall smoothed, I wasn’t too concerned. I don’t believe that anything causing these tiny blisters would be something that would bleed through and stain the wallpaper.
Some substances do stain wallpaper, though. For more on that, do a Search here.
Very hard to see here, but look closely and you will see vertical stains running down the wall.
This wall is right behind the sink. And this spot is right below the hand towel. Obviously, people reaching for the towel with wet hands has led to water – sometimes tainted with soap, toiletries, or cleaning agents – to drip down the wall.
The resulting stains are minor on the painted wall. But, once the wallpaper goes up, it is possible that these substances will bleed through the primer and the wallpaper and cause staining on the new wallpaper. So, proper remediation is needed to prevent stains from bleeding through.
Also, once the new paper is up, people will need to be more cognisant of not splashing the wall.
It’s a misconception that wallpaper is “washable” or “stain resistant” or “will hide flaws.”
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