
So I cut the piece over the door and left just a bit hanging below the door. I trimmed this bottom edge along a part of the design.




Why? Getting the pattern centered, working out the logistics of the width of the wallpaper and the width of the wall (left me with 2″ strips on either side), the narrow strips between the firebox and the door molding, and the decorative moldings to trim around, some with as little as 1/2″ clearance.
This textured vinyl wallpaper is a beautiful and beachy update to this home office. But – man – it sure beat my butt! This should have been a one-long-day job, but it took me two days.
The material is very thick and hard to manipulate into place. And it is extremely difficult to cut through – even with a brand new razor blade. Add to that the many (10 – count ’em -10!) points of decorative door and window molding to cut around. And several other tricky spaces.
The end result, though, is beautiful and calming, and the homeowner loves it.
The home is in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston. The interior designer is Stacie Cokinos of Cokinos Design, who does mainly new-builds and whole-house remodels in the greater Heights area.
Top photo: At 27″ wide, my next strip was going to extend past the door top molding a few mere inches, leaving me with a seam in an awkward place.
Second photo: I’ve drawn a pencil line parallel to the door molding, showing where that seam would fall. This means I would need two strips to fill that space, and both of them would be narrow, and thus wobbly and hard to keep straight.
If only I could make that next strip less wide…
Third photo: Voilà! The pattern was such that I was able to slice one of the motifs out of the center.
Fourth photo: This made my strip about 5″ narrower, while keeping motifs intact. It also kept the turtle at either end; important because it will be matched up to the turtle on strips on either side.
Last photo: My engineered strip lands just shy of the edge of the molding. Now I only need one strip to fill the space between it and the corner.
Artist’s chalk pastel stick, for coloring edges of dark wallpaper, so the white substrate does not show at the seams.
Craft store paint, for diluting and striping under where wallpaper seams will fall, to prevent the stark white wall below from peeking out.
Blue plastic “cut tape.” I place this along the top of a strip of wallpaper, to prevent paste from getting onto the molding or ceiling.
In the instance pictured above, the left edge of that strip of wallpaper was going to lap onto the newly tiled wall. A pain to wipe paste off all those small and irregular tiles.
Running protective blue plastic tape down the left edge of the wallpaper strip kept paste from getting slopped onto the tile, and eliminated the need to wipe areas clean
See those dark smudges and scrapes on the wall, on both sides of the corner? The homeowner had crown molding installed, and this resulted in damage to the walls.
Either scraping while manipulating the wood into place, or the carpenter letting his sweaty hands touch the walls, or maybe leaning against the wall with his keychain rubbing on it.
So, best to have work like this done before the new wallpaper goes up.
This is the same house as in yesterday’s post, and I love the way the papers in the two near-by rooms coordinate in theme and color.
Note how the light blue color is just enough to make the beautiful millwork / moldings in this room stand out.
A geometric pattern in this dining room was more than a bit of a challenge. The wainscoting ran to slightly different heights as it went around the room. The ceiling in most sections was pretty level – but on the right side of the east wall, the crown molding ran up, and then back down again.
All of this means that the design motifs were not going to line up perfectly all the way around the room.
Even though the eye sees the pattern at the level of the chair rail most prominently, I chose to position the motifs so they hit the top of the wall with their tops intact. This meant that the bottom of the motifs were cut off when they reached the chair rail.
This ended up being a good decision, because, as already mentioned, the varying heights of the chair rail meant that the motifs would land on it at different points, anyway. Also, since so much of the room was comprised of the 5″ high areas over the doors and windows, I felt it more important to keep the motifs intact at the ceiling line.
That worked fine most of the way around the room. Except for that east wall, where the crown molding rose and dipped. The wainscoting also got off-level here. That is the second photo above.
I ended up with motifs that tracked up and down from the two moldings. That meant that the motifs became taller or shorter, or had more or less space between them and the moldings than the rest of the room. This would have been acceptable, because the homeowner was well aware of the home’s framing issues.
But I pulled a few tricks out of my hat to camouflage this. I took scrap wallpaper and cut out around the design motifs, to make them the correct shape and height to match others around the room, and appliquéd them on top of the skewed motifs.
No photos of this process, sorry. But you can see in the second photo that the motifs look whole and uniform all the way across the wall.
This wallpaper is by Baker Lifestyle. It is a sturdy non-woven material. It can be hung by paste-the-wall, but I prefer to paste the paper. The home is in the Heights neighborhood of Houston.