Creating Wallpaper To Cover An Area That Was Not Planned For

When I first consulted with this family about wallpapering one wall in the master bedroom closet, the homeowner didn’t tell me that she also wanted an 11″ wide outside corner (sort of like a column) papered. No pic of that, sorry.
The mural to be used, shown above, was custom-sized to fit the main wall, so there wasn’t enough to cover this 11″ wide column.

But because the door and mirror covered up so much of mural, I figured I could use these unused areas to cover that column.

Here I’ve taken a scrap of the white sky area and applied it to the top of the column.

Now I’ve taken a section of the tree area that I liked the pattern of, and hung it on the lower 2/3 of the column.

Since I was making do with salvaged scraps, I had to take what was available. The top portion of this scrap is cut off, because it was used in the mirror / door area of the room. The straight cut doesn’t look so great.

So I used a scissors to cut along the design, creating a more natural edge of tree tops.

Overlaying this on top of the straight cut white sky area would result in a horizontal ridge under the paper. It would hardly be noticeable, but I could disguise it better. I used a pencil to mark the outline of the edges of the tree tops and then cut around it with a scissors. I made sure to leave about 1/2″ so the bottom printed tree paper would overlap on top of the sky area.

Here it is put back in place. Now the ridge follows the contours of the top edge, and is less noticeable.

Shimmer and Glimmer in a River Oaks New Build

Here is a brand-new, very contemporary home in the River Oaks neighborhood of Houston. The lady of the house definitely has a streak of glam, because there are touches of glitter, shimmer, gilt, mirror, crystal, pearl, and more throughout the house.

This textured, shiny gold wallpaper fits right in! I hung this on one wall in the entry of the home.

The material is an embossed vinyl on a non-woven backing, and can be hung by the paste-the-wall method or the paste-the-paper method (which is what I did). The instructions say that if you follow the directions in prepping the wall and hanging the paper, it will strip off the wall easily and in one piece when it’s time to redecorate.

This design is by Deiter Larger, and is made by Marburg, a German company, and distributed by Sancar in New York City. It was bought from my favorite source for good quality, product knowledge, expert service, and competitive price – Dorota Hartwig at Sherwin-Williams in the Rice Village, (713) 529-6515.  She is great at helping you find just the perfect paper! Discuss your project and make an appointment before heading over to see her.

Compensating for Crooked Walls

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Today I was to hang this cute bear wallpaper on one accent wall of a baby’s nursery.  The walls were 0ff-plumb, and the ceiling was not level, and the pattern was very plotted and symmetrical.  So let’s just say that the room presented challenges.

One thing that helped was the way the blocks of bears are printed on the wallpaper.  See Photo 1.  Unlike most wallpaper designs, the motifs did not cross the seams, so there were no elements to be matched from strip to strip.  This left me free to place the bears’ heads at the top of the wall with every strip.

Normally, when the ceiling is not level, the wallpaper pattern (the heads of the bears) would start to move up or down the ceiling, and that means that the heads would start to get chopped off horizontally.

But since this pattern did not cross the seams of the wallpaper and I didn’t have to match any parts of bears across the seams, I was able to pull each strip up to the top of the wall, and eating a uniform line (or head-count 🙂 ) at the top of the wall.  It meant that the lines of bears were not perfectly level from strip to strip – but that was not very noticeable, and was a whole lot better than seeing heads get chopped off.

The walls on either side were also not plumb.  As a test, I hung the first strip of paper butted into the corner, so it is parallel with the wall.  The second photo shows my laser level red line against the side of the paper.  If you could see above the top of the photo, that red line is butted against the edge of the paper at the top of the wall.  Yet as you move down the wall, the strip of wallpaper moves away to the left of the red level line.

I could pull the strip of paper into plumb so that it aligned with the red laser line – but that would cause a slew of bears to get their heads sliced off vertically where they hit the adjacent wall.  As well as when they got to the opposite wall.

Also, since the ceiling was not level, the bears’ heads would start marching either up or down the ceiling line, and, again, some bears would get their heads chopped off.

What to do?

I checked for plumb on both outer walls, and found that both walls were off-plumb by a fairly significant amount.  Luckily, both walls were out of plum parallel with one another.  This meant that I could hang the paper off-plumb and butted into the right corner, and it would come out on the left side of the wall nicely parallel to the opposite side (right corner).

So the pattern aligned nicely with both the right and left walls.  But since to do this I had to hang the paper off-plumb, it would also go off-level at the ceiling.  And since the ceiling was already no where near level, it was very likely that the pattern was going to track up or down that ceiling line, with a bunch o’ bears getting their heads cut off.

Here is where the placement of the pattern on the 20.5″ wide wallpaper made a difference… Because I didn’t have to match a bear’s head to a bear’s head horizontally across the seams. I could position each strip so that the tips of the bears’ ears were at the top of the wall.  (Read previous paragraphs.)

But because the ceiling was off-level by such a great degree, some of the pattern did get crooked, and so you see a couple of black feet starting to appear above the brown bear at the top of the wall (See photo 3).

But I’d rather have a few paws showing at the top of the ceiling, than have a bunch ‘o bears get chopped off vertically at the corners.  But still, I didn’t like looking at those paws hanging down from the ceiling.

The fix was easy.  I took some scrap wallpaper and from it I cut some thin strips of white paper that I then pasted over the offending paws.  Voilà!  No visible dangling paws.

AND the pattern looks amazingly equal in each corner,

This is a new townhouse in the Cottage Grove neighborhood of Houston.

Major Transformation – From Dark & Dated to Sleek, Serene & Modern

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This under-the-stairs powder room in a townhome in Montrose (Houston) was originally papered in a dark murky blue striped wallpaper – very trendy back in the early ’90’s when this home was built (just like the shiny gold faucet and towel ring 🙂 ).

Neal LeBouef of L Design Group is helping the new homeowners bring their home into the New Millennium, with a sleeker, cleaner, and more contemporary look.

I don’t like grasscloth in bathrooms because it stains and runs when it gets splashed with water, and I really dislike the shading and paneling (color variations between strips) inherent to grasscloth. But I really do like Neal’s choice of this faux grass product! Thibaut Designs’s Bankun Raffia is a faux grasscloth in a woven pattern that has real texture and a subtle shadowing effect. It looks a whole lot like the real thing, but is free of the color defects of real grass, and is much more durable in wet areas.

I have hung this pattern many times, and it always looks crisp and clean and serene and, depending on the color, tailored and handsome. It’s thick, which makes it a little difficult to work around corners, but after many hangs, I’ve got the corners mastered.

In this room, I was unable to get the original wallpaper off the walls. It was coming off in 1″ pieces, and the 1′ square section I did get off took more than an hour, and left the wall a mess. So I opted to smooth over any uneven areas, and then sealed the paper with Gardz, by Zinsser, which soaks into porous materials like this (won’t work on vinyl or anything with a gloss), and then seals it, drying hard. It dries fast, and is suitable for hanging new wallpaper on top of it.

In the second photo, you see one wall in the original dark paper, and the wall to the right covered with the new fake grasscloth. With all the walls covered, the new look is fantastic. The shiny gold faucets will be changed, and a new light fixture and mirror will be added.