Hallway Wallpaper Repair – Thibaut Honshu

This couple in the West University neighborhood of Houston loves color and avant garde – unexpected and fun! I hung this Honshu wallpaper by Thibaut in their small hallway at the beginning of the pandemic – April 2020. Since then, they decided to change the faucets and showerhead in the bathroom on the other side of this wall. To access the pipes, the plumber had to cut a hole in the drywall. The ‘guy’ that this couple uses did a fantastic job of cutting the drywall, preserving the wallpaper, and then patching the hole. You can even see that his cuts are perfectly level and plumb!

Slapping wallpaper patches over the two holes would have probably sufficed. But I wanted to make it better, so I stripped off and replaced the old wallpaper. This meant patching the guy’s drywall repairs. I didn’t get a photo, but I used drywall tape and joint compound to even out the areas. A heavy duty floor fan plus a heat gun helped get the smoothing compound to dry in a few hours. I sanded smooth and applied wallpaper primer, and ended up with what you see in the photo.

To conserve paper, instead of replacing the entire two strips from ceiling to floor, which could have caused some problems with matching the pattern on the left side, I patched in about one foot down from the ceiling line. To disguise the appliqued area, I used a scissors and trimmed around the wallpaper design, as you see here. This is less visible than a straight horizontal cut.

In this photo, the two strips have been put into place. You could never tell there was a hole (or two) !

Sophisticated “Bloom” Pattern for Newborn Baby Girl

Wall is primed and read to hang.

Baby’s finished wall!

Close-Up … Watercolor-y look and feel on “non-woven” substrate that mimics real gasscloth’s substrate.

Rolling panels out on the floor, to verify sequence and pattern placement before hanging.

Panels laid out in sequence. Panels rolled backward and secured with dollar store hair bands, to reduce “curl” and “memory”, and, most important – to prevent the surface of the paper from coming into contact with / being contaminated by the paste on the wall.

Hanging a small test strip, to see how material will perform. This was important, because both the specs printed on the label , as well as the insert instructions, AND on-line instructions, turned out to be incorrect. Testing helped me know which installation process to follow.

Manufacturer and pattern information.

Layout diagram showing pattern orientation. Note that this design can be hung with the “flowers” coming up from the floor (as the new mother requested here) or hanging down from the ceiling, as depicted on the mock-up they sent.

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 …

Really Long Pattern Repeat

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.

How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count The Ways…

This wallpaper is by Anderson Prints. It was more than a little difficult to work with. I hung it in two different colorways, and both were equally cantankerous.

~ Top photo – see the streak of darker color at the tip of my scissors? This defect ruined a 9′ strip of paper.

~ Second photo – look at the left edge of the toilet, from that corner up to the ceiling … see the darker color? Every strip showed a little darker color at the edges. Close up, you don’t notice it, but from a distance, there is a vertical line that catches your eye. This is on every seam, in both colorways. So, from a distance, you see this faint but noticeable vertical line every 27″, all across the room.

~ The substrate sucks up paste, enough so that after pasting and booking for a few minutes, by the time I got it to the wall, there was virtually no paste left to hold it up, and absolutely no paste on the edges. I tried several tricks – rolling paste under the seams, spritzing the edges with water, dipping the edges of the booked strips into water to keep them hydrated, unbooking and repasting, unbooking and spraying the back lightly with water to reactivate the paste, and finally, the best option was to paste the back as normal, but use a squirt bottle to add a bit of water, and then cut the booking time a little.

~ No matter which pasting technique was used, particularly on the tan colorway, in some areas where the ink crossed the seam, the paper wanted to curl back and leave a tiny gap.

~ The pattern matched in most areas, but dropped a little in some of the motifs, resulting in a mis-match. Then it would match up perfectly again as you went further down the wall.

~ The paper, particularly the silver colorway, twisted and warped horribly. I would butt a strip up against the previous strip, matching the pattern, then go to smooth the rest of the strip against the wall – only to find HUGE puckers and warps. OK, you can tease away minor wrinkles. But when you have several warped areas that are each protruding 1/2″ away from the wall, it’s really difficult to get that strip of paper to lie flat against the wall. I spent at least 20 minutes working and easing the puckers out of one strip and getting the paper to lie flat. To be honest, I’m astonished that I was able to do that. This particular wall had only three 7′ high strips … Because the warping increases as you hang subsequent strips, if I had had to hang many strips in a row, and taller strips, such as on a bedroom accent wall, I don’t think it could have been done without making some relief cuts or double cuts and resulting in some serious pattern mis-matching.

~ The tan colorway was reasonably durable, plus minor creases would pretty much disappear when the paste dried and the paper pulled flat to the wall. But the silver colorway was very delicate, and was prone to creasing at the drop of a hat. Don’t fold it, don’t wet-trim it, unbooking a pasted strip was very likely to cause a crease, and ditto when pressing the paper into a corner to trim … and working around that toilet was the prime area to put stress on the paper and cause more creases. This toilet was butted up against the wall, so it was impossible to slip the paper behind it, so it was necessary to cut the paper to fit around it. That’s hard enough to do with an electrical outlet that protrudes a half an inch from the wall, but veeery difficult when you have something as three-dimensional as a toilet. I must have spent the better part of an hour working the paper around and behind and under that toilet. Note to Self: Next time, make the homeowner pull the toilet out of the room!

~ The silver colorway had a metallic sheen, and every way the light hit it made the pattern look different. It was literally impossible to see the pattern match in some instances, particularly when turning a corner. What looked like a tan line on the right wall would literally show up as a silver line on the left wall. Look at all the horizontal and vertical lines in this design… It was virtually impossible to tell if I had the right line matching up with its proper partner. Trimming on the table (such as when I needed to split a strip) was equally difficult. I was just about impossible to tell design from shadow, and to know if I was cutting straight along the pattern.

~ Metal left marks on the paper. So I had to be very careful while using my straightedge, as well as other tools such as scissors, trim guide, etc.

~ The paper wouldn’t slide around on the wall as most do, so it was difficult to get each strip perfectly positioned.

~ It ate razor blades like crazy. The paper somehow dulled blades faster than even heavy vinyls.

~ When I cut a strip off the bolt, it wanted to stay rolled up. This made it very difficult to trim or paste the strip. So I had to roll all the strips backwards, until the paper relaxed and got rid of the “memory” to curl.

Most of these issues have to do with the substrate used by the manufacturer, but toss in the metallic ink and whatever engineer screwed up the pattern match.

Good Reasons NOT To Let The Handyman Hang Your Wallpaper

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“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.

Homeowner Tackled the Wallpaper Install – So, How’s That Working Out for You?

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The homeowner tried tackling this wallpaper installation herself, without even consulting so much as a YouTube video. She didn’t do an all-out bad job, and the paper is still stuck to the wall after three years. But there are a number of things that were done incorrectly.

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.

Wallpaper Repair Behind a Toilet

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.