My Helper Is More Interested In The UPS Guy

A Subtle Change Makes A Big Difference

This young family has lived happily in their new Oak Forest ( Houston ) home for a couple of years. But they never loved the expanse of white walls and lack of character . They knew they wanted wallpaper at some point.

All settled in and two kids later, now the time is right!

Entry hall before

Two walls done. The ” French Linen ” pattern is quiet, with subdued hues , but does much to bring in warmth . The room also looks brighter .

I centered the pattern / stripes on the front door, because it is in the widest section of the entry hall , and most likely to be seen by people walking in and out of the home.

Door leading to the powder room. It was tricky working with a striped pattern in this home, because some of the walls and corners were very out of plumb , which could cause the stripes to go off-kilter , which would not look good against all these vertical door moldings (five doors like the one you see above).
I won’t bore you with details, but it took a lot of measuring , plotting , and trimming to get the stripes to fall straight alongside the door moldings .
It took me two days to hang / install this hallway . The finished room was worth it!

One reason these stripes look so warm, is the linen-like texture of the print . They look crisp and clean , but still inviting . Yes, like newly-ironed French linen .

This wallpaper is by SureStrip , made by York . It’s not a traditional non-woven material , but still, it’s designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece , with no damage to the wall when you redecorate .
Sure Strip is thin and flexible and hugs the wall tightly. It comes pre-pasted , so all you really need to do is wet the back to activate the paste . I do also roll on some augmentive adhesive . And then sprinkle water on the back and use a paint roller to spread it around. Fold and book and let rest for a few minutes before taking it to the wall.
I like this brand and material a lot.

Footprints From The Factory

Whoa-ah! This is undeniably a foot print! Smack inside a bolt / roll of wallpaper . It’s hard to conceive how a roll could have come off the production line, fallen on the floor, become unraveled, and then some worker stepped on the backside.
I mean, at the factory, the paper gets printed, trimmed, sealed in a wrapper, and then … well, how does an opened roll fall under some guy’s foot??
I didn’t want to use this section of wallpaper, for fear that the footprint contained some element like ink or oil that might bleed through the surface of the wallpaper.
Luckily, it was near the top, so I was able to cut it off and discard it. Still, it meant the loss of several feet of wallpaper.

A Really Fun and Colorful Home Office

The lady of the house is an educator , and she generally works on campus. But when she does have occasion to use her home office , she wanted something bright and cheery .

Wish list granted!

Opposite corner of window wall

Pattern is nicely centered on that west wall .

Yes, the wallpaper had to go behind that sliding barn door .

It’s a mystical and fanciful jumble of gnarly branches and perky flowers .

There were some disappointing pattern mis-matches on some rolls , due to printing errors or poor trimming at the factory . But, from a foot or two away, with a busy design like this, you couldn’t tell.

This stuff comes from Sweden . I’m getting three names for this paper, and am not sure which is the manufacturer or the line or the designer. But if you Google these, the material should come up. “midbec ,” ” Lina II ,” ” Lina Schnaufer ,” ” Scandinavian Wallpaper & Decor .” Oh, and be sure to include “wallpaper.”
It’s a non-woven substrate , so you can hang by paste the wall method . Or, I usually prefer to paste the paper . The seams were near invisible .
Non-wovens are designed to strip off easily and with no damage to the wall when you redecorate . In the meantime, they’re durable , and a little more washable than paper wallpapers , plus are usually easier to install .
The home is in the Oak Forest / Garden Oaks / Heights area of Houston .

Cheery Yellow Accent Wall for Toddler Girl

A jolt of color for an otherwise all-white room. Well, O.K. – she’s a little girl, so there’s a lot of PINK in here, too!

Before

Close-up. The yellow and orange go very nicely with pink accents in the room .

Closer-up

This is made by Spoonflower , and their wallpaper is designed to be overlapped at the seams by 1/2″. This overlap does leave a slight ridge running from ceiling to floor . With this busy pattern , it’s not noticeable at all.

Here’s another view. Not an eye-catcher. Actually, there are advantages to overlapped seams. It’s stronger than a traditional butted seam . No worries about the paper shrinking and showing a gap at the seams. And, in the event of an unstable surface underneath, also it distributes tension from the drying and shrinking wallpaper , and thus prevents layers inside the wall from pulling apart and the seam opening up. Do a Search here to read previous blog posts about delaminating / unstable walls.

Spoonflower is different from other companies, because it comes in panels , rather than traditional rolls. Each panel can be 3,’ 6,’ 9,’ or 12′ long. For the record, just to keep things confusing, Spoonflower calls each of these panels a “roll.” Each comes nicely packaged in an individual, thick, plastic zip-top bag .

They send a diagram of what you’ve purchased. This family is papering both the daughter’s room and the son’s room, so that’s why you see two different patterns on the print-out.

Spoonflower makes three types of wallpaper. I really like their pre-pasted smooth , and it’s the only one I’ll work with. Their Traditional Pebble vinyl is very difficult to work with, and also thick on the wall. And please just forget about Peel & Stick . Not a good concept. Click and read my Page to the right.

The home is in the Oak Forest / Garden Oaks / Heights area of Houston .
installer

Body Parts ?!

I’ve just opened this can of wallpaper primer . What a surprise … I’m not 100% certain, but that sure looks like the leg of a bug – two, in fact – floating on top. Eeek! Doubly puzzling is that they’re both nice and clean. I mean, why not covered with primer?
I’ve posted before about the place where I buy my primer , mixing some tint into it so I can see where I’ve spread it on the wall, and they always seem to leave a bit of unblended pigment that then smears on the wall. Search for previous post.
But this ain’t no wayward bit of pigment

I like Pro 977 Ultra Prime by Roman , wallpaper primer , specifically formulated for use under wallpaper . Please don’t hang wallpaper over latex or any other kind of paint or coating .

Rolled From Top Or Bottom?

Why can’t I find the pattern match from one strip to the next?

Turns out the paper on the right was coming off the roll upside down . Once I turned the roll over, now you can see that the pattern matches across the seam.

OK, it’s simple enough to re-roll a bolt of wallpaper so the top is coming off the top of the roll, instead of the bottom. But this does worry me, because I have to wonder WHY the paper got rolled backwards in the first place.
These papers come off the printing presses / digital printer and are immediately rolled up at the factory. So they should all be the same, right? All rolled in the same direction, right?
The fact that one is rolled in the opposite direction makes me wonder if maybe it was purchased, not used, and then returned to the factory. Then an employee included it with my client’s order.
Saves money for the company. But worries me.
Because rolls / bolts of wallpaper printed at different times can be slightly different shades of color, due to the ink having been mixed at different times. These different batches of ink are called run , dye lot , or batch .
Placing two different runs next to each other on a wall can result in a slight color difference, which will show up as a striped effect on the wall.
I’ve had this backward – forward roll happen with this brand before . The paper went up fine and there were no shading issues. Today’s install went fine, too.
But, still, it makes me worry. And you’ve got to wonder how this happens in the first place. I mean, who’s at the factory rolling paper in one direction, and then how does some get rolled in the opposite direction?
Actually, now that I think about it, I did encounter smudges on one of the three bolts of wallpaper we had for this job. (To see photos, do a Search here to see pics in a separate blog post.) And that was, indeed, the odd roll that had been rolled backwards. Makes me suspect even more that this had been purchased by a previous shopper, rejected, and returned to the factory. Then shipped out to my client as new wallpaper.
The brand is Katie Kime and the pattern is called Mum’s the Word .

Smudges on Katie Kime Wallpaper

I was disappointed to find smudges running through one of the three double roll bolts of wallpaper for the downstairs bathroom .

These weren’t extremely noticeable, and we could probably have gotten away with putting this on the wall; viewed from a distance, not many people would see this.

But I think it looks bad, and wanted my client to have a better looking install .

These smudges and streaks ruined about 6 linear feet (12 square feet ) of wallpaper . Luckily, I have my clients purchase a little extra, so I was able to discard this damaged material and still have enough to paper the bathroom .
Interestingly enough, this showed up in an odd bolt / roll that was rolled backward from the other two bolts we received for this job. Made me think that this roll had been purchased by someone else, found defective, returned to the factory, and then some employee sent it to my client, not realizing that the material was flawed .
That also makes me worry about shading / color variations between strips. Read my other post about this .

The pattern is called Mum’s the Word and is by Katie Kime . They may think it looks like flowers . But what I see is fireworks !

Blades … Higher Price = Better Quality

American Line brand snap off blades , 10-pack

10-pack snap-offs by Olfa , incl receptacle for securing spent blades .

OK, confession – we paperhanger s love our blades! Scraping blades, smoothing blades , trimming blades, single edge , snap-off …. you name it.
Most professional installer s use these snap-off blades for trimming wallpaper . Both of the packs above contain the same number of blades. But the Olfa brand is way more expensive than the other.
My colleagues rave about how much sharper the Olfas are, leaving clean, crisp cuts. And how they can get more cuts with each blade.
These are available at Sherwin-Williams , and other retailers .
houston

Muted Desert Botanical Mural for Baby Girl ‘s Accent Wall

This room originally served as a home office. But with a baby girl coming, the homeowners are changing it into a nursery. The desk and computer have been moved out, carpet has been cleaned, and now we’re ready for wallpaper on this one accent / crib wall .

Over-scaled foliage in soft colors fill the wall. The colors coordinate nicely with the grey/tan of the other three walls

Before. Smooth ( un- textured ) walls, builder’s original paint .

I primed with my Roman Pro 977 Ultra Prime wallpaper primer .

This product is a mural , meaning that it is a scene, rather than a typical wallpaper pattern with repeating motifs . It comes in eight panels , and each panel is numbered a-h (1-8).
The height of the mural fits the wall’s height, with a few inches to spare, which is good, because we want to allow for trimming at ceiling and baseboard.
But the mural is wider than the wall . It’s about 12.5′ wide, and this wall is only about 9′ wide. That means that some of the mural will not be used.

I’m glad the furniture is out of the room! Here I’m rolling the panels out on the floor, to check pattern match, to be sure sequence is correct, check measurements , and to determine which panels / parts of the design will be used, and which will be discarded .

This is a paste-the-wall product, so I don’t need my large pasting table . After the wall is pasted (no photos), to make it easier to get the 10′ long strips up to the wall , I roll them backwards (so paste on the wall won’t get onto the face of the material ) and secure with hairbands from the dollar store .
These rolled-up panels are placed in sequential order .

First three strips are up. Pasting the wall is a very “clean” way to work, and no paste gets on the ceiling or baseboards , and the scraps that are trimmed off are paste-free, too, so no worries about soiling any surface they may encounter. I still cover the floors with dropcloths .

One last strip to go! The right side of this panel will overlap that wall by a few inches, and I will trim it to fit.

Close-up .

Done! This will be a soft and welcoming backdrop for the crib .

Installation instructions . I use Roman 780 adhesive .

The brand is Nestig , which is an on-line company that makes all sorts of baby things.
I had never heard of this wallpaper brand before, so was a little leery , especially since the surface is vinyl . But it turned out to be a good product. Seams were pretty invisible , pattern matched perfectly (except one small area) , vinyl surface will be washable , and non-woven backing will allow for easy removal when the child outgrows the pastel decorating theme .