Battling Curled Rolls

Wallpaper comes in tight rolls. Often, when you cut a strip off the roll, it wants to remain curled up, as you see here. Some types of non-woven material are really bad about this.

Even with weights on it, it’s hard to keep this stuff flat enough to get paste on the back. And when you do, it’ll often curl up again and get paste on the surface of the wallpaper .

So I’ll take the bolt of paper and carefully roll it backward , securing it with an elastic hairband from the dollar store. This was a several-day job, so I let the rolls sit over night. But often all you need is a few minutes to eliminate what we call ” memory ” – the desire for paper to stay rolled up.

Look at how nice and flat and flexible this example has become.

Note: rolling backward can damage the material, particularly some non-wovens that are what I call “puffy” and thick. Folding these backwards can cause the fibers to crease – which doesn’t look good on the wall! So it’s important to roll the material around a form for support, such as an unopened bolt of wallpaper. And to roll carefully and slowly as you go. Once the paper is completely re-wound and the hairband secured, you can carefully remove the support. Still, with some types of N-W, you may still end up with creases.

Unfurling Stiff Non-Woven Wallpaper

These new(ish) non-woven / paste the wall wallpapers have a lot of advantages , and most of us installers like working with them. But a lot of brands can be very stiff, and can be difficult to get to lie flat on your table, for both measuring and pasting.

I’ve found that rolling the paper backwards , either by the strip of the entire roll , will help get rid of that ” memory .” Some materials can be damaged / creased when you do this, so it’s important to work gently, and even better to use an unopened roll or other tubular object to start rolling around. Then I use elastic hairbands from the dollar store to hold the paper in place.

It doesn’t take long. Just 15 minutes will usually do it. Here is a roll that has been rolled backwards, now released and relaxed and lying perfectly flat on my work table.

Falling Floral Mural in West U Dining Room

Two opposing accent walls , above the paneled wainscoting , will be papered in this dining room .

Here’s the south wall finished. Super cool how the flowers tumble from the sky downward .
This was actually two murals put together . Before you purchase , it’s important to make sure that one mural can be placed next to the other and have the pattern continue from one to the next .
Instead of starting in a corner and working across the wall , I plotted to put the fullest part of the mural in the center. This will nicely frame a buffet, or other furniture used on this wall.

Since this is a mural and each strip of wallpaper is different, and because I’m starting in the center with Strip #3, and then working left to right, and then going back to the center starting with Strip #2 and working from right to left, and because with a mural you have only one of each needed strip, so if you screw something up there is no more backup wallpaper to bail you out … So it’s important that you measure and plot and re-check everything before you cut anything and before you take any strip to the wall.
So here you see all my strips cut and positioned as they will be placed on the wall. This is a paste-the-wall non-woven material , and note that I have rolled each strip backwards with the top coming off first, and secured with an elastic hairband from the dollar store. This both gets rid of the ” memory ” of the paper wanting to stay tightly curled up , and also keeps the printed face of the wallpaper from bopping into the pasted wall .

Here’s the north wall, before.

Instead of centering the pattern on the full width of the wall, I centered it on the left section.

First strip going up butted against the vertical red line of my laser level .

Bosch brand , less than $100 at Lowe’s .

This wallpaper is called Artemis Climbing Walls and is in the Blackthorn collection .

Manufacturer is House of Hackney . This outfit makes some mighty nice wallpaper , and they have some very fun an innovative designs.
Most are sold as a 4-panel set mural , and can sometimes be tricky to measure for.
It’s a nice non-woven material , durable, and the seams are invisible . I used the paste the wall installation technique .
wallpaper installer houston

Erasing the Memory of a Stiff Non Woven Paper

“Non-woven” papers are all the rage these days, as manufacturers rush to provide DIY homeowners with goods that will strip off the wall easily, and that are environmentally-friendly. Many non-wovens, however, present a unique cacophony of challenges. One of these is that they can be grossly stiff and cantankerous, which makes getting them to conform to the wall pretty much of a battle. This particular product is a paste-the-wall (instead of paste-the-paper), which comes with its own idiosyncratic game plan.

Here, after I have trimmed my strips to size and am preparing to hang them, I have rolled them backwards, which will prevent the face of the paper from bopping into the pasted wall, and which will help erase its memory (wanting to stay curled up as it was on the bolt).

This stuff is so stiff, and wants so badly to curl back up into a tight roll, that my usual tools won’t hold it. I am lucky that my clients have this stairway, with convenient balusters, in between which I can stick the rolled strips of paper, to hold them and hopefully erase their memory, until I am ready to hang them.