Wildwood Floral Pattern in Water Closet

Nicely centered pattern in the potty room of this beautifully renovated 1926 home in the Woodland Heights area of Houston .

Toilet alcove before … along with my cute baby T-shirt used to cover and protect the toilet seat.

Toilet area finished.

Looking from the main room into the commode room / potty .

Finished. The colors coordinate beautifully with the tile .

Wildwood is yet another of the cheerful and fresh patters by Rifle Paper . I’ve been hanging a lot of their papers lately … the brand is very popular .

wallpaper installation houston

Horizontal Cut To Ease Installation in Tight Spot

This is an under-the-stairs cloffice ( closet turned home office ). Wallpaper needs to go along the wall on the right. Over the top of the shelf alcove on the right, over the top of the shelf on the left, down the center, into the niche above the desk area on the left, and then down and under into the knee / kick area under the desk on the left.
Easily accomplished with paint. But tricky with wallpaper – which can twist, crease, tear, buckle, etc. Not to mention paste getting slopped onto all that nice newly-painted woodwork.

The part above the desk is not so horribly tricky, but this portion under the desk is, mostly due to the narrow transition point.

Another issue is that the strip of wallpaper is set to extend to the right about 5″ over the shelf alcove. This means that paste will be getting onto the woodwork, as well as adding weight and stress to the whole strip.
Since the wallpaper comes in a rectangular strip, a whole lot of the top section is going to overlap onto that sloped ceiling area, getting paste on that, too.

To make all that easier and cleaner, here I have roughed in some cuts, measuring and templating ahead of time, to reduce the amount of paper that will overlap onto the shelf woodwork and the ceiling.
Once this strip is pasted, I’ll use my blue plastic tape on the pasted side of the paper, to keep paste from getting on to the navy blue paint. No photo of that, but you can Search on ” blue tape ” to see previous posts about that cool stuff.

As mentioned above, it was going to be really difficult to manipulate the wallpaper down the wall and then down and under the desk area without damaging the paper.
So I decided to eliminate stress on the paper by cutting the strip into two sections – one for above the desk and one for under it. I used my straightedge and a razor blade and cut along a horizontal element of the design.

Here I have the top section in place. No need to wrestle a 24″ wide strip down that narrow area and then down and underneath the desk.

Here I’m about to position the bottom piece.

Here it is in place.

All finished! No stress on the paper, no creases or tears. And no swearing during the installation!
This wallpaper pattern is called Florida Toile and is by Katie Kime in their very popular Cities Toile collection .

Doggone It – It’s P&S

That first pattern is darned cute! It’s called Puppy Pile, and is from Chasing Paper. Unfortunately, like most of their products, it is a peel & stick material, which is extremely difficult to work with. It comes in 2′ x 4′ panels, which are some pretty odd dimensions, if you are trying to paper a wall.

I don’t work with P&S materials, and most of my colleagues won’t either. If you love the look, there are surely other companies making a similar design, printed on traditional wallpaper stock.

The second photo shows a fun design used as a backdrop to beds in a cabin guest room. This pattern would be overwhelming on all four walls, but in the bed alcove, it is snug and inviting. Sorry, I don’t know the manufacturer.

Both these photos were found in Better Homes & Gardens magazine, a current issue.

Jungle Mural on a Bedroom Niche Wall

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This alcove / sitting area is in the entry vestibule of the master bedroom in a renovated-and-expanded 1914 home in the Houston Heights. Every wall and surface in the home is white, or some faint derivative of white. Meaning, colorless and lifeless.

This fun jungle mural with birds and foliage and a good (but not crazy) dose of color changes all that. Behind the headboard, as most accent walls are, might have been too much with this particular mural. But the homeowner envisioned it on this on one wall in the vestibule – the wall that the family will see when they are in the room with the kids, or on the bed.

In the second photo, I am laying out the mural, to see how I want to position it on the wall. The mural is about two feet too wide for the wall, and about 10″ too tall, so some of it had to be trimmed off. The homeowner wanted the bird on the left to be visible, so I plotted my placement around that.

One of the photos shows a mock-up of the mural which was included in the instruction sheet. It shows that the mural comes in eight panels, and it shows which design elements are included in each panel. This is very helpful in deciding which areas will be cut off, and which will be placed prominently on the wall.

Complicating that is the width of the individual panels relative to the width of the wall, and the fact that the paper will expand just a tad once it is wet with paste, which throws off initial measurements based on dry paper.

I’ll skip all the math and engineering, but to cut to the chase, I trimmed a little off here and added a little there, and the mural fit the wall beautifully, with the bird taking prominence on the left, an another large bird being featured just about in the dead center.

Purchased through Anthropologie, this mural is by SureStrip, one of my favorite brands. It is a thin, pliable, pre-pasted non-woven material that is designed to strip off the wall when it’s time to redecorate. In the meantime, it was positively lovely to work with, and it will stay on the wall and perform beautifully for years / decades to come.

The home is a young family in the Houston Heights, and it was on the annual Homes Tour.