Geometric Grasscloth in Home Gathering Area

No, this large room with sink and counters isn’t a kitchen. The family loves to entertain both family and friends, so included this “bonus” room in their new home’s plans. It’s used for both entertaining and crafting.
The wall facing you was originally painted a semi-gloss navy blue. In the photo, I’ve applied my wallpaper primer.
It will adhere to the glossy paint, and provide a matt finish for the wallpaper paste to grab ahold of.

Taking measurements and plotting the layout.

This paper has a selvedge edge , which has to be trimmed off by hand with a straightedge and razor blade. The manufacturer has not provided trim guide marks , so I am using a ruler and my eye.

The new look is so dramatically different I couldn’t resist taking a photo mid-hang. As you can see, I’ve used dark paint to stripe under where the seams will fall, to prevent any of my primer from showing through at the seams.
You can see the ceiling line starting to track upward on the right portion. More on that below.

Finished. Perfectly centered.

This is the mounting hardware for the big screen TV . I asked them to remove the TV, but we left the mounts in place. In order to support the heavy TV, they are placed quite securely into the wall , and I feel it’s best not to jimmy around with that.
Rather than have the first strip straddle the TV mount, I plotted to have my first seam fall down the middle of the wall, placing a seam in the mid point of the mount. This meant I had to hang four strips instead of three, but it made it a whole lot easier to work around the TV mount, as well as to keep the left and right edges of the grasscloth straight and plumb.

Close up showing the texture of this grasscloth material. It’s atypical to have grass cloth printed with a pattern , and I rather like the way the ink looks somewhat scratchy against the rough background.

Because it’s Schumacher, you can expect printing defects . The slight pattern match doesn’t bother me, as there were many more places along each strip that matched up perfectly. Nor do I mind the different intensity of ink on the two strips. That’s all part of the look of grasscloth.
But I wasn’t pleased with the white ink out in the middle of nowhere, as seen about 1//3 down the center of the picture. This isn’t considered a defect , and from a distance it’s not really noticeable. But it bugged me.

So I used some water-based paint and a very small brush from the craft store and lightly touched up the spots.

I also softened the mis-matched edges a bit. There’s a fine line between covering the white spots and staining the material, so use a light hand. And never permanent ink or oil-based markers or pastels.

Likewise, the ceiling line was not level, so as I moved from the mid-point out to the right, the ceiling rose above the geometric motif’s top edge, and a white line began to be visible, but only to the right of the centerpoint.

So I used the black paint to cover up that extra bit of white. This increases the width of that horizontal navy blue line from 1/4″ to about 1/2″. But from down on the floor you can’t tell, and it looks a whole lot better than having white on the right side and none on the left.

The brand is Schumacher and the home is in the Garden Oaks / Oak Forest area of Houston.
The interior designer who came up with this bold and lively look is Clayton Brooks .

Dark – But Not Boring – Paper for Media Room

Media room before.

After

It was tricky getting the paper into that 1 1/2″ wide space between the windows, but it really makes the windows stand out.

Close-up. The non-woven material is made of synthetic fibers, rather than cotton or wood pulp.

The manufacturer is Schumacher, and the pattern is called Cymbeline.

When you’re cocooned to watch a movie in your tricked-out media room, you want the room nice and dark. But a dark wallpaper doesn’t have to be plain or simply textured.

The vining tree limbs and leaves of this wallpaper pattern add interest and movement to the walls and keep the mood from falling somber. But don’t distract from what’s going on on the big screen.

Schumacher is not one of my favorite brands. But this paper was not one of their contrary screen prints, but rather a non-woven material. It was stiff and thick, but pasting the back softened it up and made it pliable and cooperative.

The home is in the Montrose neighborhood of central Houston.

Remove TV Before Wallpaper Goes Up

Here is the wall in a media room where the big screen TV hangs. It’s virtually impossible to hang wallpaper around these wall-mounted TV’s. It’s just difficult to do, plus paste gets smeared all over the TV.

So I request that the TV be removed. The black horizontal bars are the mounts for the TV. These are pretty secure in the wall, and I feel it’s better to not mess with them. It’s easy enough to trim around these bars and the cables. And once the TV is back in place, you’re not going to see any little gaps between the wallpaper and the brackets.