




Please read captions under the photos above, for synopsis information.
zUsed to brighten and personalize the accent wall behind a crib for a new baby girl (the new parents are waiting on a name!) this design by Emma Hayes is entitled Bloom.
Contrary to the information on the manufacturer’s website, the product label, and the instruction insert, this product did not need expensive materials or physical gymnastics to get onto the wall. It ended up being quite nice to work with.
I was made of a non-woven material, which is all synthetic, which means it is dimentionaly-stable and won’t shrink when it dries (or put undue tension on your walls).
another good thing about this paper is that it can be custom-sized to fit any wall. Here, it is important to have the paperhanger measure first and determine how many bolts to buy before you order. It’s not about total square feet. It’s more about how many strips are required to cover your wall.
And it’s imperative that you add 2″ to EACH dimension (top, bottom, and either side), to allow for matching the pattern, wonky walls, un-level ceiling, etc. The extra 1%-2% that some companies add simply is not enough. No matter what the guy on the website’s “Help” line says – they simply do not understand wallpaper, nor do they really know how much you need to buy.
This design is sort of a knock-off of other, more expensive designer brand names – but at a lower price-point, as well as printed on an install-friendly substrate (as opposed to brands that like to “waffle” and “quilt” and curl at the seams and other mis-behaving stuff …
This wallpaper pattern by Justina Blackeney has a really long pattern repeat – 45″. That means that any given design motif appears only about every four feet!
See photo, where I have rolled the paper out on my table.
Depending on the height of your walls, matching the pattern could result in a tremendous amount of waste. Indeed, I was cutting off and throwing away about 2′ of paper for every strip I put on the wall.
That’s why a strip count is a more accurate way to measure for how many rolls of paper you need, instead of going strictly by square footage.
“He was good at everything else he did,” said the homeowner. “Painting, drywall, and everything else. He just had never encountered un-prepasted wallpaper before.”
Pre-pasted or hand-pasted material has little to do with it … this poor fellow’s skillset didn’t cover basics like matching the pattern, wrapping corners, butting seams, trimming neatly along the edges, patching over a mistake, removing the old wallpaper, properly prepping the walls, or using an appropriate adhesive (he made a mad dash to a local box store… Sherwin-Williams or Southwestern Paint would have been better).
He also failed to remove the existing wallpaper. I am sure that that paper could have been stripped off, with proper knowledge and a little time. Then the walls should have been primed – another step he skipped.
In addition, there is a gummy residue that feels something like rubber cement left along the top of the tile. This will be pretty difficult to remove, and any product that can dissolve it will probably stain the wallpaper.
And this rubbery-feeling gunk makes me fear that this wallpaper will be very difficult to get off the wall. There are some versions of “wallpaper primer” that result in a tacky surface that is great for grabbing ahold of wallpaper – but NOT for letting it go when it’s time to change décor.
The bottom line for these homeowners…. They paid this guy to put up their wallpaper, and will now have to pay me to fight to get it off the wall, fix any damage to the wall surface, subjugate the problematic adhesive residue, re-prep and reprime the wall, and then rehang the new paper.
The last photo is from a different house, but shares some of the same problems, most particularly improper wall prep.
1. Walls were not primed with a wallpaper primer
2. Caulk should have been run around the top of the backsplash
3. Paper was wrapped around the edge of door moldings and not trimmed.
4. Seams were overlapped
5. Overlapped areas were not secured with a “vinyl-over-vinyl” adhesive.
6. Pattern was not matched.
7. And, last but very important – a poor choice of wallpapers.
I am not a fan of paper-backed, solid-vinyl wallpapers, especially the pre-pasted, lower-end products. Do a Search here on various terms, and you will learn a lot about the material and its poor performance. IMO
In the meantime, when I take on this job, I will remove all the old paper, scrub the walls to remove paste residue, fix any dings in the walls, prime with an appropriate primer, hang the paper properly, by matching the pattern, butting the seams, and trimming correctly along baseboards and door moldings, etc., and, when finished, I will run clear caulk along the top of the vanity and other key areas, then give the family my “lecture” about leaving the door open and using the exhaust fan and avoiding long steamy showers.
Some renovations were being done in this home in the Museum District, and the toilet was removed. The toilet tank had sat very tight to the wall, so the previous wallpaper installer was not able to get wallpaper behind the toilet. Instead, he cut around it, leaving a blank space behind the tank. Not a big deal at all, it happens from time to time. But once the toilet was removed, the homeowner did not like the idea of the empty wall back there. I failed to get a shot, sorry.
I was called in to patch the spot. I originally planned to replace a short, full-width strip, from the seam to the right of the toilet to the corner on the left, because all that would be potentially visible would be a horizontal splice about 14″ above the floor, and maybe a slight color difference between the paper on the wall and the paper that had been rolled up in storage for many years.
But after studying the situation, I decided to make the patch as small as possible. I could hide the splice better if I didn’t go all the way to the corner and instead kept it close to the toilet. This would also minimize any difference in pattern match, due to different expansion of the material, between what I installed and what the previous guy installed. (Different methods, different pastes, might mean different amounts of swelling / expanding.)
What I did was strip off the old original paper (a blue vinyl paper, installed before the other guy put up the tan ship yard paper). This was harder than I expected, because the original guy had not primed the wall, and when wallpaper is stuck directly to the Sheetrock, it can be VERY difficult to get off. I also removed the curled, un-stuck parts of the tan ship paper. I primed with Gardz, a good sealer for Sheetrock, and used a heat gun to dry everything quickly.
Then I cut a fresh piece of paper, matching the pattern, a little bigger than the section I had removed. I pasted it, booked it (let it sit a few minutes), and then put it over the area. Then I took a straight edge and a new razor blade and cut around the patch, just a little inside the edge.
I removed the outside area, then carefully lifted the new patch away from the wall, and removed the overcut area on the paper on the wall. Once that was removed, the new patch fit into place invisibly.