Kill Point Over Door, Ridge, More

After you’ve hung wallpaper on all the walls in a room, the point where your last strip meets up with the first strip is called the kill point . This virtually always ends up in a pattern mis-match. That’s why you engineer to place it in an inconspicuous place, such as behind a door.
This powder room, though, had no hidden corner or handy door. That meant that I would have a pattern mis-match a full 5′ high, to the left of the toilet you see here. I prefer to have the pattern match in a corner like this. As you can see – it does. I will explain how I accomplished that.

I decided to place the kill point over the door. Even though this space is 2′ high and a mis-match might be noticeable, not many people are looking up over the door, so it’s a better choice than in a 5′ or 9′ long corner.
The dark smudges on the wall in the photo are where I’ve spread paint, to prevent white walls from peeking out, should the dark wallpaper shrink as the paste dries.

Here I’ve positioned the strip on the left. This leaves a gap of about 3″. Once I match the new strip up to the piece on the right, its pattern will not match perfectly with the strip on the left.

Now I’ve positioned both strips, and the one on the right is overlapping the one on the left.
Here’s an idea of what the pattern mis-match will look like. To be honest, it’s not all that bad, with this busy pattern and being up over the door. Still, I thought I could make it look better.
I’m going to do a double cut , which is our installers’ fancy term for a splice. I’m going to cut through the two strips, splicing them together, cutting along the vertical foliage elements, to minimize cut-off motifs and to disguise the splice.

When double cutting on the wall, it’s really important that you slice through the two layers of wallpaper only , and not cut into the primer or wall surface beneath. This is because, if the wall surface becomes scored or compromised, when the wallpaper paste dries and the paper shrinks and pulls taught, it can put tension on the wall surface. If the surface is not intact, it can give way and actually come apart ( delaminate ), resulting in wallpaper that comes away from the wall – and there’s nothing beneath it to paste it back to.
I’ve blogged about this before, so do a Search here to learn more. It’s important!
Anyway, to protect the wall beneath where I will make my splice cut, I’ve placed three layers of scrap wallpaper, to pad the wall. I figure I can cut through the two top layers, but not all five.
Note that three layers of non-woven material have some thickness, and can “throw off” the splice cut and prevent the top two strips from fitting together perfectly. In this case, the paper is flexible enough that I’m not worried about that particular scenario.

The strips are in place, and I’m ready to make my cut. I prefer to use a single-edged razor blade held in my fingers, rather than a blade-holder. What’s most important is that the blade be brand new and spankin’ sharp!

Here I’ve made my cut and am removing excess paper from the right side of the top strip. Look carefully and you can see how my razor blade followed the contours of the vertical foliage design elements.

Here I’ve removed the excess paper from the left edge of the bottom strip. You can see they are poised to fit together nicely.

Before fitting the two strips back together, though, I’m examining the wall surface. Check the photo carefully, and you’ll see that I did, after all, score into the primer. 😦 The surface below is skim-coat that was used to smooth a textured wall – and another potential layer that may come apart when exposed to tension from the drying wallpaper.
Shoulda used a Boggess Strip. https://www.steveboggesspaperhanging.com/lexanpage.htm

One way to prevent the wall from delaminating is to put something over the compromised area, to distribute the tension of the drying paper and take it away from the cut wall. Here I’ve taken a scrap of wallpaper, which is a tough non-woven material, and carefully peeled the printed surface from the white substrate (no pic of that process). Now I have a thin material that I can use to pad the wall.
I’m using the black printed side facing out, in case the spliced strips shrink a little – anything peeping out will be black and not noticeable.

Here is the bit of paper in place, spanning across the cut on the wall.

Now I’ve smoothed the two top strips back into place. Since my double cut followed along the vertical foliage elements as much as possible, and because I cut around the gold flowers to keep them full and round, the pattern looks like it matches up just about perfectly.
But wait! … What’s that lump / ridge under the wallpaper, the full height of the seam? That’s my seam padding! Doesn’t look great.
I’m really surprised at this. The non-woven wallpaper material is thick. But that’s why I pulled the top and bottom layers apart, to make my patch piece thinner. I guess not thin enough. Once dried, this ridge is going to be obvious.
But, to be honest, this is up over a door where no one’s going to be spending much time looking. In addition, once I get my 100 watt light bulb out of there and replace the homeowners’ original, small light fixture, this bump under the wallpaper will be pretty much indiscernable.

Still, that lump was buggin’ me. Another invention from my colleague Steve Bogges to the rescue! Pictured is his seam tape , which was made specifically for this type situation. This is very thin – yet strong – paper tape that is used to bridge cut areas like this, and prevent tension from drying wallpaper from tugging at unstable walls.
The tape has a pre-pasted side (the gloss you see), and feathered edges, to make it less noticeable under wallpaper.

Hard to see, but here I’ve placed the seam tape over the cut wall areas

Now the two top strips have been smoothed back into place. Amazingly, no bump from the seam tape beneath shows. And the pattern mis-match is barely visible, too.
Win-win!
All that’s left to do is to wipe paste off the surface of the wallpaper. This overlapping and splicing does mean that wallpaper paste will get on the surface of the strip underneath. Actually, there is a way to prevent that, and it also involves products from Steve Boggess …
But … that’s a blog post for another day …

This pattern is called Peonies and is by Rifle Paper.

Stinky Ink = Curling Seams

Some higher-end wallpapers are screen-printed with an ink that smells like moth balls. We call this stinky ink. And it’s a stinker to work with – because the edges curl badly. The inked surface of the paper absorbs moisture from the paste differently from the backing, so the backing swells and expands, pushing the inked surface away… resulting in curled edges. The top photo shows the edges curling on the pasted and booked strip, and the second photo shows the edges curling on the wall. I tried a lot of tacts, but could not get the seam to lie down.

This paper has a selvedge edge that is to be trimmed off by the installer(straight edge and razor blade and a steady hand). When I tried this standard technique, the seams curled and would not lie flat.

So I tried another approach. I put the pasted but un-trimmed paper on the wall, and then used the double-cut technique. A double cut is essentially a splice – you position one strip, then position the next strip, overlapping an inch or so of the second strip vertically over the edge of the first strip, all while lining up the pattern.

More clearly, you’re overlapping the left edge of the new strip onto the right edge of the existing strip.

Then, using the custom-made trim guide tool seen in the photo, and with a strip of 3″ wide heavy polystyrene plastic (called a Boggess strip, after the guy who invented and sells it) on the wall to protect it from being scored, I used a new single-edged razor blade to carefully cut through both layers of wallpaper.

In the third-to-last photo, I am removing the excess paper left at the seams after this trimming. In the second-to-last photo, I am smoothing the paper back into place. It’s also important to wipe off all paste residue left on the surface of the paper.

Who knows why, but this technique results in nice, flat, tight seams, with edges that do not curl.

Same paper, same paste, same wall – but no curl. Go figure.

Double-cutting takes more time, patience, material, and equipment. But when it’s called for, it might be the salvation for a contrary paper.

Vinyl Wallpaper and Un-Straight Walls

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OK, a lot of technical stuff coming up, and a little hard to follow, but I will do my best to explain. Here I am hanging a faux-leather, textured paper-backed solid vinyl wallpaper with no pattern to match. In the left side of the first photo, I have just come from left to right around an outside corner. When you wrap wallpaper around a corner, you can bet that the corner will not be straight or plumb and the wall may even be bowed. That means that you cannot expect the right edge of this strip of wallpaper to be straight, and that means that you cannot expect the next strip of wallpaper to butt up perfectly against it.

Since this paper has no pattern to match, the solution is simple, if not easy. I am going to overlap the next strip and splice it in with the previous strip. But you don’t want to just overlap and slice through both layers with a razor blade. Doing so could: 1.) get paste on the surface of the first strip, which, since it’s a textured paper, would be hard to wipe off, and, 2.) score the wall, and that means that when the paper dries, it shrinks and puts “torque” on the seam / surface – and that could cause the surface to pull away from the the subsurface – keep in mind that here we have Sheetrock, paint, new paint, and wallpaper primer, one on top of another, so there are several layers that can all pull apart from one another. To put is succinctly, the end result is a curled seam – which cannot be glued back down.

So, in the first photo, in preparation for the double cut (splice), I have put a “Boggess pad,” which is a long flexible strip of polystyrene plastic under the seam, to protect the wall. You see a bit of it peeking out on the right side of the photo, and you see the ridge it makes under the paper in the center of the photo.

On the right side of the second photo is the new strip of wallpaper, coming to meet the existing strip. Along the edge of this new strip of wallpaper is a strip of waxed paper, and you can see some of it sticking out on the left edge. This waxed paper will protect the existing strip of wallpaper from the paste that is on the new strip of wallpaper.

In the third photo, the metal tool with the pointy top on the left is a special straight edge that I use for cuts like this. I have already made the cut along its edge, and you can see both the cut and the waxed paper on the left side of the cut. You can see a little bit of the hump created by the polystyrene strip under the vinyl paper, on the right.

In the fourth photo, I have pulled the vinyl strip on the right back a little, so I can pull off the waxed paper from under it. The polystyrene strip is still against the wall, under the vinyl paper on the left. I am about to remove that, too.

All this has taken some time, and another factor playing in here is “open time,” which means how long the paste will stay wet and allow you to fiddle with all this.

In Photo 5, I am about to smooth the two edges of the seam back together.

In Photo 6, you see how perfectly the edges meet. A double cut (splice) really gives you the most perfect seams, because the two pieces of paper are truly melded together. It does take a lot of time and materials, though, and is not really called for except in certain situations.

This room turned out looking great, and the homeowners were pleased. The homeowner did ask me why my price was higher than the guy who had hung paper in another room. From what I saw, the other installer did a good job in that room.

But I’m wondering if he has knowledge of primers and layers of wall surfaces and torque and open time, and if he has waxed paper on his truck and knows when to use it, and if he has a special $125 trim guide and knows how to use it, and if he has ever heard of a Boggess strip or if he just cuts into the wall and hopes it all holds together.

Bottom line … sometimes special situations call for special tools and equipment and skills.
Not saying another guy couldn’t do it his way and have it turn out looking great.
Just saying I’m glad I have these gadgets to use, and the know-how to use them to keep the homeowner’s wallpaper clean and unwrinkled.