Monkey / Jungle Toile in Heights Hall Bathroom

Before. Good colors. But nothing inspiring.

Done. Boy, this paper really visually pushed the walls away and made the room look larger ! Easy on the eye tone-on-tone pattern , lighter colors , and a teeny bit of gold sparkle .

Note the 5/8″ high strip of wallpaper under the medicine cabinet on the left.

Because those faucet handles sit up so high above the backsplash , it’s likely that when people reach for the handles, water will get splashed onto the wallpaper . To prevent splashed water from wicking up under the wallpaper – which could cause the paper to expand and curl away from the wall – I ran a bead of clear siliconized caulk along the top of the backsplash .

The color is skewed in this shot, but you get an idea of the tropical foliage and pattern scale .
Toile is a French word for a sort of pen and ink drawing in one color on a background that may be colored or may not be.

Close-up , showing a truer color . Note the palm trees and the monkey . This material has a woven -look textured surface , and it mimics fabric . I almost felt like I was install ing linen , instead of wallpaper .

The brand is Rasch , a company out of Germany . Their papers are consistently nice to work with. This one was unexpectedly thin and flexible . It’s textured vinyl on a non-woven substrate . The vinyl makes it durable and stain-resistant , and the NW makes it easy to remove later when you’re ready to redecorate . The seams are positively invisible.

This powder room on the first floor just off the home office / study comes complete with a shower . Just for fun – one of the obstacles in this room was this rain shower head – sticking out right where I need to be on my ladder , and keeping me from reaching those walls . On top of that, the faucet handles also stuck out much further from the wall than most do. While priming the walls, as I was climbing down from the ladder , my clothing actually got entangled in the handles and – turned on the water !
Yes, I got a shower at work today !
The home is in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston .

Medicine Cabinet? WHAT Medicine Cabinet?

Digital Image

The homeowner of this new contemporary townhome in the Midtown neighborhood of Houston didn’t want the plywood medicine cabinet standing out like a big white blob against her beautiful new wallpaper. She thought that covering it with wallpaper would help it fade into the design, and be less obvious.

She was right – the cabinet is much less noticeable now.

The cabinet is simple, but it still took about an hour to cover it with wallpaper. The wood had already been primed with KILZ, a stain blocker that will prevent any wood sap from bleeding through the wallpaper. Then I applied a wallpaper primer.

There is a seam down the middle of the door, so there is a total of four pieces of wallpaper (two on the frame and two on the door itself).

The cabinet is seen more from the left side than from the front, so I lined the pattern up so it is continuous when seen from the left side. Wrapping the design around the 3/4″ thickness of the edge of the cabinet frame caused it to not line up with the pattern on the surrounding wall.

No biggie in this case … The pattern is squiggly and irregular enough that a small mis-match of the design is not noticeable.

When I got to covering the actual door of the cabinet, I aligned the pieces so that the pattern would line up with the design on the frame, so that when you look at it straight-on (as from the toilet or shower), the pattern is visually intact. Again, even though the design does not line up perfectly with the design on the wall behind it, the slight mis-match is very minor.

The pattern match is perfect from where it’s viewed from the left side, and it is perfect where it’s viewed from straight ahead. Win-Win!

This wallpaper pattern is by York, in the Sure Strip line, and was bought at below retail price from 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.