Cozy, Slightly Rustic, Textured Paperweave for Houston Heights Breakfast Nook

Breakfast nook “before” is bright and airy – but washed out and uninspiring. The vertical tan lines are paint I’ve striped under where the seams will fall, to prevent the light colored primer from peeking through.

“After” has warmth, life, and a cheery feel. With a little color contrast, now you can see the detailed woodwork and window molding. The paper has a bit of a tropical, thatched roof, Ernest Hemmingway, sort of feel.
Note I’ve balanced / centered the pattern so it falls evenly and equally on either side of the window . Note how perfectly the motifs fill the space above the windows, as well as below the windows. It’s a minor thing that you don’t consciously notice, but it gives the room a grounded , balanced feeling .

Another angle . The chandelier is a major feature in the room. I love the way the chunky beads repeat the color and theme of the white pattern in the wallpaper.
Unlike most wallpapers that come in rolls of standard sizes , this material comes in continuous yardage on one huge (and HEAVY ) bolt .

The height of the motifs perfectly fits the space between the window and the crown molding . No flower tops got chopped off in this room !

There are five windows. This is the area between two of them, including an obtuse angle . It took a LONG time to get the paper around all five windows, keeping the pattern intact .

Close-up showing the texture . This is a paperweave , which is similar to a grasscloth , as both are natural fibers and materials . Because this paper weave is woven, instead of having stiff, straight strands of grass crossing the wallpaper , it was a lot more flexible and workable than regular grasscloth .

The space over the door molding was just 4 1/16″ high. The flower motif fit in here perfectly .
You can see along the seam in the center of the photo , that some of the fibers may try to come off the backing , especially at seams and areas where you’ve cut into the material , such as trimming around window moldings and other obstacles . This is pretty minor .
Overall, the seams are virtually invisible .
One other thing I didn’t like about this paper is that, after the wallpaper was made, the color was applied to the front, like paint . This made the color subject to abrading or flaking off under even light rubbing . It would have been better IMO to have dyed the fibers and then sewn / glued them on to the paper backing . Then the color would go all the way through. Not a biggie – you just have to work slowly and carefully and gently.
Oh, and you can’t get paste or water or fingerprints on the surface, either – because they can’t be washed off and can stain .

The pattern is called Papavero and is by Casa Branca .
The material has an unprinted selvedge edge that has to be trimmed off by hand, using a straightedge and razor blade . Takes a lot of extra time , and even more so because you have to press harder to get through the thick fibers than with a traditional wallpaper .

A picture of my straightedge and razor blade . I’m trimming something else here (that will be blogged about later), but you get the idea .

A really bad photo of a really perfect chandelier . It’s chunky , white , and the shape of the ‘beads’ repeat the flower motifs in the wallpaper. The windows will have Roman shades made of a somewhat coarse white linen type fabric , which will coordinate beautifully with the texture of the wallpaper .
The home is in the Heights neighborhood of Houston .

Obtuse Angle Inside Corner

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Wallpapering around corners, either inside or outside, can be tricky. But when you toss into the mix a corner that is not the typical 90* angle, it gets a lot more tenuous.

On an inside corner (see photo), you don’t want to wrap the paper around the corner, because corners and framing and Sheetrock and contractors are never 100% plumb or accurate, and thus your strip of wallpaper will come out of the corner off-plumb or wrinkled or otherwise unmanageable, plus you can end up with sections that cling tightly to the corner, and others that pull free, leaving a bubble under the paper in the joint area.

To prevent this, you wrap a teeny bit of the paper around the corner, cut a new trip, and then overlap that new strip into the corner, plumb it up, and then work your way out from there. That looks good in 90* inside corners.

But with obtuse angled corners like this one (Photo #1 (smoothed wall with clear Gardz primer applied), the paper may lie flat and tight to the wall, but that cut and overlapped strip will be fairly visible. Other things can be done to get rid of the overlap by eliminating the need to cut the strip, and to minimize any wrinkling at the outer edges.

To encourage adhesion in the corner, I “Velcro’ed” the area by applying a thin layer of paste, and then letting it dry to a barely tacky, but potent, state.

The material is a scrim (woven fabric) backed, textured solid vinyl wallcovering. It is thick, and only a little bit pliable. Here in picture #2, I worked the paper into the corner, and used my Euni Tool (metal plate) and other tools to really push it hard into the corner. A heat gun softens the plastic just enough to help it remember where the wall is.

Even though the vinyl is clinging tightly to the corner, coming out of the corner and moving to the right, you cannot be sure that the right edge of the strip of wallpaper will be hanging either straight or plumb. So it’s risky to try to butt a new strip of wallpaper to this edge.

A good alternative is to make a double-cut, which is a paperhanger’s term for a splice. That is, you overlap the papers and cut through both layers, so you can splice them together.

This pattern was the perfect candidate, because there was no pattern to keep aligned and matched up. So the design was not a concern… but logistics and surface stability were.

Using a razor blade to slice through two layers of textured vinyl wallpaper takes a lot of pressure, and that can put deep cuts into the wall below. When the wallpaper paste dries, or even just with time and humidity and temperature fluctuations, the paper can shrink, and that puts torque (tension) on the wall, which can cause an unstable surface to pull away from whatever is beneath it. Bottom line, you could end up with wallpaper seams that come open, and pull paint or Sheetrock off, too.

So how do you double cut (splice) two strips of wallpaper to get a perfect seam, without damaging the wall underneath? The answer is to pad / protect the wall. Many people use scrap vinyl wallcovering. But I have some better stuff – Boggess strips. Named after a wallpaperhanging colleague of mine who invented them. You protect the surface of the wallpaper from paste with plastic tape or waxed paper, and then place these clear plastic strips under where you want to make a double cut. Your blade will slice through the two layers of wallpaper, but will not get through the Boggess strip. Voilà! Paper cut and spliced, and the wall in still intact.