Handy Motif Placement by Mfgr

It’s nice when a manufacturer does this.  Notice that all of the pattern motifs are contained within the width / borders of this strip of wallpaper.  Nothing passes across the seam.  There is nothing to match from strip to strip. 

Even if the walls are out of plumb , or the ceiling is not level , this allows me to keep the same design element at the same spot below the ceiling, all the way across the wall or around the room .  See photo.  All seven strips across this nursery accent wall have the design motifs at the same distance below the crown molding.  Not having to connect a pattern motif to another across each seam means that I can pull each strip up to where I want it under the crown molding.  No going off-track or sloping / tracking down or up. 

This cute pattern of pastel hot air balloons is by Caitlin Wilson and is in the Sure Strip line of pre-pasted , easy to install and easy to remove wallpaper s made by York .  I like this material a lot. 

Challenges With Moody Jungle Powder Room

Yesterday’s install was quite fun, but there were some unusual or challenging features to the room. Here are some of them.
First, in most areas, the chair rail had a sort of gap between it and the wall, probably then filled in with caulk. I used some craft paint from Texas Art Supply to color that in, so there wouldn’t be white showing between the dark green paint and the black wallpaper.
My usual trim guide (not pictured) is thin, designed to allow you to cut very close and tight to the edge. But in this case, I was afraid it might leave some of that gapped area showing between the paper and the wood trim.

So I used this steel plate tool, which is thicker and would allow me to get a fat cut – just enough paper left to wrap a teeny bit onto that gap area. Note that before I trim, I’m going to press that edge into the corner. I couldn’t hold the camera and hold it in proper position at the same time.
Also, you’ll notice the rolled edge at the top of the tool. That’s thicker, and allows for getting an even fatter cut, for instance, when you want just a tad of paper to wrap around a corner . Do a Search to see my previous post about this technique.

Here I’ve made the trim cut and am peeling away the excess that was trimmed off at the bottom.
See how the bottom edge of the wallpaper now wraps a tiny bit and fills the gap neatly?

Next issue – wall height. On this wall, the height is 3′ + 30.5″

But on the opposite wall, the height is 3′ + 29.75″.
This means that you can expect the ceiling to move up or down, which means that a pattern motif – let’s say one of those cute chameleons – could get his head chopped off by the descending ceiling.

Next issue – bowed wall. Here my yardstick is sitting pretty squarely against this wall, in a corner .

But as I move it up the wall a little further – wow! – that wall takes a dip to the left. And it’s quite a dip! The wall has a bow in it.
I can get my next strip of wallpaper to cover that space. But the fallout will be that pattern motifs will hit the wall at different points, which means that the next piece to be placed after that, the pattern will not match perfectly at all points.

All right. So that previous corner had a bow. This one is out of plumb. Here you see my laser level showing that my wallpaper strip is hanging nice and plumb.

But move the laser to the corner and you see that it’s out of plumb .

Here’s a better example. Again, this causes the pattern to not match perfectly in the corners.

Another shot of the bowed wall, which, for various tech reasons, due to Word Press ‘s crappy New Editor , this shot got out of order and I was not able to place it with the others under the topic.

Papering around the electrical outlet , I had to unplug my light source. There was light coming in from the hall. But this paper, as well as the paint, were so dark that I couldn’t see well to work. Enter my Big Larry flashlight .

Small enough to fit in my toolbox , but really bright and dependable for when you need it.

The pattern is called Fantasy Tree and is by Breeze and was purchased through one of the showrooms in one of Houston’s decorative / design center s. It’s a nice non-woven material , easy to hang , easy to remove , durable and stain-resistant .

Bowed Wall – Corner Not Straight

We’re looking at a corner where two walls meet, over the vanity in a powder room.

Top photo – bottom of the picture … See how the wall bows away from my yardstick? And in the second photo, you can see gaps between the wall and my yardstick.

The walls are not just out of plumb – they are bowed.

The strip of wallpaper that I am about to hang will go on the wall to the right. This strip gets wrapped a tiny 1/16″ around the corner.

The next strip will go on the wall on the left. This strip will overlap that tiny 1/16″ wrapped area. This results in a tiny 1/16″ pattern mis-match in the corner.

I have a few tricks to minimize this pattern mis-match in corners.

BUT … if the wall is bowed or is not straight, as in the photos above, not all of my tricks will work, and it’s going to be impossible to get the pattern to match 100% perfectly from ceiling to floor.

Usually, no one notices this kind of minute detail but me. But still, it’s always good to have realistic expectations, and plan to accept a few pattern mis-matches around the room.

Geometric Pattern in a Powder Room – Flooded Home

This home in the Energy Corridor area of Houston was flooded during Hurricane Harvey last August. A lower section of drywall had been cut out and replaced. The contractor’s wallpaper hanger put up this identical pattern. The homeowner wasn’t pleased with the job. To be honest, the installer did a pretty good job, in a room that was very difficult to hang. There were a few minor things that could have been done differently.

But what bothered the homeowner most was that the walls had not been smoothed properly before the paper went up. With that west-facing window blasting angled sunlight into the room, those irregular surface flaws were quite obvious. See the top two photos. (You may need to enlarge them.)

I stripped off the original paper and skim-floated the walls to make them as perfectly smooth as possible. I followed with a primer. (The previous installer had not primed the walls.) See third photo for walls that are ready to go.

This room was a major bugger bear to hang. For starters, there was a large metal mirror that protruded about 4″ from the wall, that could not be removed. This was directly over a pedestal sink. (The previous installer had the luxury of hanging the room before the sink was in place.) It’s hard to explain, but the logistics of winding wallpaper around these three-dimensional objects, preventing the paper from tearing, having the ridged and unforgiving pattern match on all planes, keeping the edges plumb, and keeping the edges straight so they would butt up with the next strip, all while fighting edges of the wallpaper that wanted to curl backwards, were extremely difficult.

In addition, the corners of the room were out of plumb, which pretty much guaranteed pattern mis-matches in all the corners. On a wild floral pattern, no one would notice. But with a geometric pattern like this trellis, the eye would catch even minor mis-matches.

Compounding all of that was the fact that nothing in the room was centered. The window was not in the center of the wall, nor was the toilet – and they were not aligned with each other, either. The sink was not centered on the mirror, the faucet was not in the center of the sink, and the spout was off-set from the handle. I finally decided to balance the trellis design on the mirror, and it did fall perfectly symmetrically on either side. The kicker is that the room is so narrow that you can’t stand back far enough to appreciate all my efforts. 😦

I probably spent 40 minutes plotting how to tackle the first wall, and then a full two hours hanging the first two strips (the ones around the mirror and sink) (sorry – the room was too small to get good pics). The longer I worked, the more appreciation I had for the previous installer and the job she had done.

In the end, the walls I had prepped were smooth, and there were no objectionable bumps or gouges showing under the paper. I pulled some tricks out of my hat and got the pattern to match in the corners pretty darned well.

That window with it’s danged strong light still was a foe, though. The wallpaper seams butted together just about perfectly. Yet because of the way the edges curled back when they got wet with paste, I fought to keep them down tight to the wall. Once dried, they were nice and flat. I was pretty content. But when the sun moved and light came through that window from a different angle – some of those seams looked positively horrid! The light was casting shadows and making it look like the seams were overlapped. Yet they were perfectly flat. The inclination is to go over and over the seams with various tools and try to “force” them to lie flatter – but this can burnish or otherwise damage the wallpaper or the underlying surface. The good news is that as the sun moved, and as the louvers on the shutters were adjusted, the shadows disappeared and the seams looked good.

Let’s hope that the homeowners see this room only in the most positive light. 🙂

This wallpaper is by York Wall, one of my favorite brands. Interestingly, the paper came with the correct label, but the instruction insert was for another line made by this same company. I’m glad that I was familiar with both products, and had the sense to disregard the info that was not relative.

EDIT:  Fast forward to 2021 … the homeowner was ready to redecorate, so I got to strip this off and hang something completely different.  Do a Search on ” Katie Kime powder room “

Last Corner – “Kill Point” – On a Trellis

I apologize for the dark photo, but this is actually pretty cool. The kill point is the last corner in a room, and the wallpaper pattern virtually always ends here in a mis-match. But today, the last corner matched absolutely perfectly. That is VERY rare! It is just a chance of fate that the pattern on the right got cut off at exactly the same point as the pattern on the left, so when they met in the corner, the match was perfect.

But, well, it didn’t exactly happen all that easily.

If you look closely at the wall on the right, you will see that the pattern is a little lower than the pattern on the left. That is because the corners of the room were not plumb, causing the wallpaper to hang crooked, and when that happens, the pattern will travel up or down hill at the ceiling line. I think it’s more important to match the pattern in the corners as precisely as possible, even if it means that the pattern is not straight along the ceiling line. Because this is so common, we try to make the pattern match best at eye level, and hope that people don’t spend too much time looking at the ceiling line.

Anyway, as you move around the room hanging paper, the other walls may be out of plumb, too, causing the subsequent strips of wallpaper to go off-plumb, and then their pattern will also travel up or down hill. That means that, by the time your last strip butts up against your first strip, your horizontal lines may not line up.

And that’s what happened here. But you hardly notice. Why? The wall on the right has a seam about 2″ from the corner – right were the two motifs meet. When I had the pattern perfectly matched across this seam, the silver “ring” at the join point matched perfectly with the one on the previous strip, but the black lines from the trellis on the right did not line up with the black lines on the left.

So what I did was, I carefully removed the narrow 2″ strip of paper and slid it a little higher on the wall, matching it to the black lines on the pattern on the left side of the corner. This threw off the match of the silver rings on the wall on the right. But, hey, it is only slightly off, and it’s 7′ high and over the door, so who’s gonna notice? But if those black lines on the trellis motif mis-matched, people would notice.

This was a small adjustment, but it made a world of difference in how the finished room looks.

I realize that this is the kind of post that only a paperhanger could follow and appreciate. But I was just so excited today, to be able to have a perfectly matched kill point!