Wallpaper Too Old & Brittle to Work With

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This kitchen wallpaper was stained by a water leak. There was enough left over paper to replace the damaged section. BUT – the paper had been stored in a hot Houston attic since the ’70’s – that’s 35 years! It was far too brittle and fragile to work with.

I found that lightly wetting the back with a damp sponge allowed it to relax enough that I could unroll it. I tried my usual wallpaper paste, but once the sample piece dried, there were stains caused by the paste. See third photo.

Then I tried powdered wheat paste, which is for more delicate materials. This did not stain the paper, but it did cause it to become too wet, crack, split, tear, and created crevices where staining would be likely to occur. See last photo.

I am glad I tested methods and products before I ripped off the old wallpaper. We ended up leaving the old paper on the wall, and I used craft paint to cover the worst of the stains. See previous post. This turned out to be the best solution.

Warming Up an All-White Bathroom

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This is a nicely done bathroom in an attic conversion of an older home in the Oak Forest neighborhood of Houston. The homeowners loved the look, but, with white subway wall tile, white floor tile, white vanity, pale cararra marble counter top, and white wall paint, they thought the room felt cold. They were right. They were also right when they thought that a subtly-colored wallpaper would warm up the room.

This trellis pattern in grey-on-white is perfect for this room. It adds just the right definition between the wall space and the white tile and wood, while sticking with the monochrome color scheme of the room.

The homeowner originally was thinking of papering only two walls in the room, and leaving several detached walls painted white. I suggested that papering all the wall space would give a more cohesive look. She took me up on it, and once the room was finished, it was very clear that papering all the walls was the right choice.

Because the room was built into the eaves and sloping roof of the home’s attic, there were lots of vaults and angles and tricky turns to work around. These took a lot of time, and ate up more paper than a room with a flat ceiling would. The last photo shows the pile of remnants that were left after matching the pattern and cutting around the angles, doors, and vanity. It also takes extra paper to match the pattern properly in the corners. Again, I’m glad the homeowner listened to me and ordered the amount of paper I recommended.

This classic trellis pattern is by Brewster, and was bought on-line directly from the company. It is a non-woven material, and a paste-the-wall product.

Why Doesn’t the Pattern Match in the Corner?

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When you wrap wallpaper around an inside corner, you never wrap the whole strip, but rather cut the strip vertically so that just a tiny bit wraps around the corner, and then you overlap the next piece on top of that. This allows for undulations in the corner, keeps the paper tight in the corner, prevents puffed areas, permits you to re-plumb the new strip – but it also means that a tiny bit of the pattern will be lost, due to the overlapped area.

In most cases, that overlap is minimal, and you don’t notice the lost pattern. But in this case, in the remodeled attic of an 80 year old home, the ceilings were not level, the walls were not plumb, and the corners were not even straight (meaning, some of them were bowed).

The corner in the photograph was off by a good 1/2″ from the ceiling to the countertop. The 12″ wide strip I cut wrapped the corner a wee bit at the top of the wall, but by the time it reached down to the vanity top, almost half an inch was wrapping around the corner. This means that that 1/2″ would be covered up by the subsequent strip – and that means that the pattern would be distorted, as you see in the photograph.

I could have measured carefully and trimmed carefully, and cut the strip to fit the corner with minimal overlap. But that would have meant that the new strip of wallpaper would not be hanging true-to-plumb – and that would have meant that the motif at the ceiling and floor lines and along door jambs would be going crooked.

So, you have to pick you poison.

I decided that the pattern mis-match on this busy pattern was minor enough that it would not assault the eye, and I preferred it to the option of having the pattern go crooked at the ceiling and doors.

This wallpaper pattern is called “Emily,” and is by Hygge & Weste, an on-line company. http://www.hyggeandwest.com/