Cheer in a Sphere on the Backs of Bookshelves

Again, the same home as my two previous blog posts. The homeowner is filling this lifeless all-tan house with color, movement, and fun patterns!

Take this bookcase – usually people put a textured wallpaper on the backs of their bookcases. But this homeowner went for a bit of color and pattern. You have to look close at the top photo to see, but the dotty circles are way fun! The dots even have a raised, embossed texture. They add a lot of life to the space, yet are calm enough to not conflict with the objects they will display on the shelves.

I put the same pattern in a curved art niche in a hallway close to this family room bookcase.

The homeowner has skillfully used this aqua color scheme to tie together several rooms in her home.

The home is in the Garden Oaks neighborhood of Houston. The paper is an embossed (textured) vinyl surface on a non-woven substrate, and could be hung using the paste-the-wall method or the paste-the-material method (I prefer the latter).

This wallpaper pattern is by Exclusive Wallcoverings, and was bought from my favorite source for good quality, product knowledge, expert service, and competitive price – Dorota Hartwig at Southwestern Paint on Bissonnet near Kirby. (713) 520-6262 or dorotasouthwestern@hotmail.com. She is great at helping you find just the perfect paper! Discuss your project and make an appointment before heading over to see her.

Trimming Grasscloth Inside a Curved Arch / Working Clean

Digital Image

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, here is how I trimmed the stiff, rectangular grasscloth to fit the arched top of the bookcase back. You see slits in the excess paper, which we call “relief cuts,” that allow enough ease that the paper can be tucked against the wall, and then trimmed with my razor knife.

The blue stuff is a trick I used to keep paste off the painted areas around the bookcase. This is nice because it saves having to wipe the paste off. It is also important, because with grasscloth, you can’t get any paste or water on the surface of the paper, because it will leave a stain. So even wiping paste off the woodwork with a damp cloth, which is commonly done with most wallpapers, could cause water from the cloth to get onto the grasscloth and stain the natural material.

The blue stuff is a special 2″ wide thin plastic tape, invented and sold by a colleague who is also a member of the Wallcovering Installers Association (WIA). The tape has other uses, like to keep paste off the flat paint on ceilings, and when overlapping and splicing (double cutting) strips of wallpaper.