A somewhat new type of wallpaper , called non-woven ( also called paste the wall ), comes with many advantages. Because it’s made of minimum 20% polyester content , it doesn’t expand when wet with paste like papers made of wood or cellulose pulp. Nor does it shrink as the paste dries . Because of this trait, you can paste a strip and take it directly to the wall , with no booking / resting time . This same characteristic allows you to apply paste directly to the wall , instead of to the back of the paper , if you choose. This is sometimes a little faster and cleaner than pasting the paper . And for a simple accent wall , you can roll the material out on the floor , eliminating the need for a work table . (Still, I generally prefer to paste the paper.) Another benefit is that this stuff is tough and strong , and when you’re ready to redecorate , it will strip off the wall easily and in one piece, with no damage to your walls . (So say the manufacturers. 😊 ) One test to know if you have a non-woven wallpaper is to try to tear it. If it’s hard to tear, chances are it’s a NW . Also, sometimes those polyester fibers are very evident , as you see here at the top of this photo. One of my colleagues likens it to fiberglass. He may just be right!
Pretty birds , nicely spaced branches , and lovely colors for this master bedroom in the Heights neighborhood of Houston . This accent / headboard wall is even prettier from a distance . Here’s the wall before. The other three walls are painted a complementary grey .From a distance. I’ve got one more strip to hang , on the far right. Close up . The background is silver with a little gloss to it, but not so much as to be glitzy or garish . I mean, a guy sleeps here, too. So it’s gotta be a bit subdued . This wallpaper is made by Graham & Brown. G&B is a good quality , mid-price range company. Like most of their papers, this is a non-woven / paste the wall material . Much of G&B’s paper is thin and flexible . But this particular pattern came on a thick and stiff substrate . N-W’s contain a minimum 20% polyester content, and I suspect this has a higher percentage . The stuff is somewhat akin to fiberglass . Look closely at the bottom of the photo, and you can see the fibers . This makes it good, and easy for DIY ‘ers , on simple installations like accent walls / feature walls . But it can be trickier when you have to trim around obstacles like windows , decorative moldings , vanities , toilets , and the like. Non-woven wallpapers are designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece when it’s time to redecorate , with minimal or no damage to your wall (assuming proper prep was done before installation ). A much better choice than peel & stick .
Before. Most of this home is in the white / beige / neutral decorating scheme. The homeowner wanted something with pizzazz to snazz up the powder room. Textured walls have been smoothed, primed, and are ready for wallpaper.Definite WOW! factor!Toilet corner before.Toilet corner done.Another viewClose up.Closer up. The textured background you see is the non-woven material this is printed on. It has a 20% polyester content, and is thus somewhat similar to fiberglass. Very hard to tear, resistant to stains , and designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece , with no damage to the wall , when you redecorate . It can be hung by pasting the wall , or by pasting the paper . I generally prefer to paste the paper . Rolling it out on the floor , to see the overall pattern , and to decide what element I want to place at the center of the focal wall as well as at the top of the wall . This pattern is so wild and crazy and over-all, that it ultimately doesn’t matter about pattern placement . That’s pretty rare . The pattern is called Central Park and is made by Thibaut . The home is in the Galleria / Tanglewood area of Houston . What’s very cool is that the homeowner had ordered large samples of three colorways , but couldn’t decide which she wanted to go with. So she taped them to the wall, threw a dinner party , and asked her guests to vote for their favorite. This bright and colorful one won, hands down! Now she’ll have to invite them all back again, to see the finished room! I think the color and the design go super nicely with the weathered-white , deeply carved front of the vanity . installer installation
This is the back of a strip of non-woven wallpaper , that has been torn. This type of material is minimum 20% polyester content. Some of my colleagues have called it fiberglass. I’m not sure that’s true, but there sure are fibers visible when the material is torn. In fact, on a lot of these, you can look at the backside and see masses of fibers pressed together to make the substrate.
The vanity and marble countertop have been removed. This makes it easier for me to work, and also allows the paper to go down behind the countertop, rather than being cut along the top of the backsplash. So no worries about splashed water wicking up under the wallpaper and causing curling.What a beautiful room for a 10 year old girl!Peacocks and posies . This is a non-woven or paste-the-wall material. It was pretty thick and stiff. N-Ws contain minimum 20% polyester. There are many advantages to using them as wallpaper, including easy removal when it’s time to redecorate, because the strong material is supposed to stay in one piece and strip easily off the wall. One of my colleagues says it’s made of fiberglass. In this close-up shot, you can see the fibers and plastic-like sheen. I have a hunch my friend is correct!Manufacturer is Graham & Brown , pattern name is Resplendence , color is Blush ( dusty pink ).
This kitchen in the Spring area of north Houston suffered severe water damage from burst pipes during the hard freeze in February 2021. Nearly a year later, they are almost finished with repairs, including new drywall on bottom of walls, new cabinets, new plumbing, cabinets, electrical, and more. Here you see the contractor’s repair work on top of some of the original wallpaper, which dates to the early 1980’s! It was a good brand, and the installer did a great job. For various reasons, I opted to leave this wallpaper in place, and so skimmed over uneven areas and then primed on top of it with Roman Pro 977 Ultra Prime. The homeowner’s new choice is very similar to the previous paper, but with a more springy feel and a lot of upward movement. The area below the chair rail will receive another coat of paint to better define the correct yellow color. Or, the homeowner may switch to a green pulled from the leaves in the pattern.This wall with the fir-down / soffit was a real bugger, for various reasons, and took me about four hours.Looks so sharp against the white paint and tile!The wallpaper was printed on a white substrate, so I ran black chalk along the edges of each strip, to try to prevent white from showing at the seams. Still, some of the strips shrank just a half a tad, and that did allow some white to show. This wallpaper is a non-woven material, which has a high polyester content, and is not supposed to stretch or shrink, so this is disappointing. Pasting the wall and dry-hanging the material would have probably helped. But the material was extremely thick and stiff, and plus the room had way too many turns and bends and angles, so pasting the paper made the most sense. These gaps are very minor, and only visible when viewed from straight on; from an angle you can’t even see them. On some papers, I can pull some tricks out of my bag and camouflage them. But with this non-woven material, don’t even try anything with paint, marker, chalk or anything else – it will surely stain the material. The walls are smooth. The slight texture you see is the non-woven material. When an edge is torn, you can actually see the polyester fibers – a lot like fiberglass. This material is very strong, and is designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece when it’s time to redecorate. Manufacturer is Mind The Gap out of Transylvania (!), and the design is called Aquafleur, in the Anthracite color. The material comes as a 3-panel set, which they call one “roll.” The overall width of the A, B, and C panels side-by-side is about 5′, and the height is just under 10′. The height of the wall was less than 5,’ and the strips were nearly 10′ long, so at least 5′ was lost of each strip. Because the pattern was a mural type, rather than a typical repeating wallpaper design, even more paper was lost in working around the configurations of the room – for instance, a full 10′ strip would be needed to paper just one 9″ high strip above the door. So there was an incredible amount of waste – and this is a higher-priced boutique brand. But the lady of the house really loves it, and so she went with her heart.
tThe homeowner loved the coppery-hued colors in this “Carousel Stripe” pattern by Cole & Son. The colors mesh beautifully with the wood tones, and also the brass faucet, in this home bar area.
What’s interesting is that I think the colors (especially the red) are more intense now, than in the samples she got from the vendor. In fact, one complaint of hers was that the vendor sent just one small snip of the paper, and didn’t show the full color spectrum of all 10 stripes that make up the pattern.
No matter. The finished effect really sets off the bar backsplash, and will be a fabulous backdrop once the bottles and glasses are back in place.
This wallpaper is a non-woven material, which is made of synthetic fibers rather than wood or cotton pulp. Instead of the paste-the-wall installation method, I chose to paste-the-paper. This made the material more flexible and manageable, which helped a lot, because when it was dry, it really wanted to crease and flake.
TFor instance, the racks sitting on the counter in the first photo could not be removed. Manipulating, fitting and trimming the wallpaper around the sharp bends and angles without marring the wallpaper was very difficult.
The non-woven, synthetic-origin material (think fiberglass) was also really hard to cut. Even with a brand-new razor blade, I had trouble getting perfect cuts around moldings, and also in a whole lot of other simpler areas.
These two rooms were hard enough, with minimal angles and corners and intricate moldings. If this had been a bathroom, or another room with a lot of turns and fancy cuts, it would have been really difficult to prevent creases and other damage to the wallpaper.
As it was, I spent about nine hours hanging these four single rolls of paper.
This is a wonderfully restored 1939 home in the Rice University area of central Houston.
See other recent post(s) for more info on this material and its install.
When ordering, from the materials offered, the homeowner chose this vinyl option, because she loved the slightly textured, “pebbled” surface. I would have much preferred she went with the more predictable and cooperative non-woven material.
The instructions said to paste the wall. Which is what I did. But I believe this material would have performed better if they had said to paste the product.
Pasting the product would have evened out moisture absorption from the paste, as well as expansion as the substrate wetted-out. That may well have eliminated the wrinkles you see in the photo.
It took a lot of patient work with both the smoothing brush and the plastic squeegee to work these wrinkles and bubbles out of the wallpaper. The resulting flat surface was not necessarily the Holy Grail … because often the far edge of the wallpaper will get distorted and / or warped / bowed.
It’s really difficult to hang a new, subsequent strip next to a strip with a warped edge. It’s hard to butt the seams, and plus additional strips get more and more warped. Eventually, you get to where the resulting wrinkles are so large that you cannot work them out.
This is one reason why you start hanging from the midpoint of the wall. This helps disperse any such wrinkles or other imperfections equally across both the right and the left sides of the wall.
I was lucky that I had only four panels and three seams on this install.
As mentioned above, a non-woven substrate would must surely have eliminated the wrinkle problem. Non-wovens are made of synthetic fibers (including fiberglass), so they do not expand when wetted by paste or water. So you can paste the wall and then apply the wallpaper, without worries about the paper stretching out of shape
Re yesterday’s install / post, one of the benefits of the newish non-woven wallpaper material is that it is dimensioally-stable, meaning that it will not expand when it gets wet with paste, and will not shrink or gap at the seams when it dries. So there is no need to paste the material, fold and book it, and wait several minutes before hanging. This characteristic allows you the option of hanging it by the paste-the-wall method.
This material by Wallmur, though, DID expand, as you can see by the wrinkles and bubbles in the photo. I was able to get the top area into place with a bit of wrangling. But the bottom half had more time to get wet with paste, and so swelled up more. Some of the wrinkles I could not get out.
My solution for that was to slice the paper vertically, along a flower stem and other vertical elements in the design. Then I smoothed out the wrinkles and overlapped the excess paper. In the finished photo, the area is to the left of the white daisy in the lower center of the mural. It is not noticeable. BUT … had this happened in the upper sky area, the slit and overlap might have been visible.
Most non-wovens contain a high fiberglass content. But I think this manufacturer used a lot of paper in his mix, which absorbed moisture and caused the material to swell.
If I had known this ahead of time, I could have done few things to mitigate the expansion. For one the paper could have been pasted on the back, instead of pasting the wall. Or, the back could have been very lightly dampened with a sponge or spray mister, and then allowed to sit for a few minutes. This moisture would have allowed the material to expand before the paper got to the wet paste on the wall.
A new sister is coming, potty training is in progress, and so it’s time for this toddler to move out of the nursery and into his “big boy’s room.”
Pictured is an accent wall, against which the bed headboard will go.
Because the wallpaper is dark and the primer on the wall is white, it’s possible that seams may not grab tightly, and white gaps may appear along the seams.
To counter that, I’ve run a vertical stripe of dark paint under where the seams will fall. The paper is a non-woven material, which has a high fiberglass content and will not expand when wet with paste, nor shrink when it dries. Yet it doesn’t hurt to have a little extra assurance that white won’t peek out at the seams.
I also used a bit of artist’s chalk (not oil or ink!) to color the white edges of the wallpaper. More insurance.
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