The wall before. Little Grayson came early. Mom & Dad wanted the nursery prettied up, with new crib and furniture on the way, and wallpaper on an accent wall . A crew of guys who do other types of home maintenance tackled the wallpaper. But they ran into problems – with bubbles , bad seams , sketchy corners , and more. I always like to know what went wrong, because then you have a chance to prevent it the next time around. In this case, I’m suspecting lack of proper wall prep. Also, the guys may not have realized that pasted paper has to book and sit for a few minutes before going up on the wall. In the photo above, Dad has removed the wallpaper. Look closely and you can see areas where the wall surface was pulled off the wall along with the paper.
Here it is after I repaired the wall surface and installed the paper .
This very popular pattern is called Priano . It’s one of my favorites, and I’ve hung it a bunch of times.
Has a water color effect to it.
The wall was originally textured , so the guys skim-floated and then sanded smooth . So far, so good. (Although I don’t know what type of smoothing compound / joint compound they used, so the wrong material could have been a factor in the fail.) They did not remove sanding dust residue, nor did they seal or prime the wall. OK, now not so good. In the photo, you can see where the seams ran, the paper held tight, and when it was pulled off the wall, it took some of the smoothing compound along with it. This is surely due to some of the mis-steps I mentioned above. But also, a more gentle method of stripping the paper off the wall could have preserved the surface better. (see my page to the right on how to strip wallpaper)
They also didn’t order enough paper, so at this last strip, had to splice some tail-ends of rolls together. This actually is something that we paperhangers / installer s do; we call it a double cut . And I’m a little surprised that these workers knew the method. But it’s really important that you not make your splice cut too deep, as you don’t want to score into the surface below. In the picture, you can see that that’s what happened. This results in a surface that’s unstable, and the layers can come apart at this seam, as the paste dries and the wallpaper shrinks and pulls at the wall underneath. So it’s important to put something underneath your to-be-spliced wallpaper, to protect the wall from being cut into. When I do a double cut, I use special strips of polystyrene to keep the blade from going into the wall surface . Do a search here to find previous posts.
I’m going to skim-coat the wall, to smooth over these blemishes, and to create a new surface. But those unstable areas are still under there. So, it’s important that the seams of the new wallpaper don’t line up with where the original seams were. Here I’m taking measurements to ensure my new strips will not fall on these compromised areas, but rather bridge them.
This flakey stuff is remnants of the paste from the previous install. Before skim-coating the wall, I removed it by taking a sanding block and lightly running it over the wall.
I forgot to take a picture of my finished wall, but here you see a bit of it, on the left. I skim-floated it with joint compound . When that was dry, I sanded it smooth . Vacuumed up the dust. Then took a damp sponge and wiped off residual dust . The used a primer called Gardz , which is thin and watery and soaks into the surface, then dries hard, binding everything together. It is also good to hang wallpaper on. In the photo, I’m hanging my first strip, lining up against the red beam of my laser level .
Bosch laser level
The paper went up beautifully . No bubbles , and the seams were nice and flat . I made a fat cut in the corners , which brought the paper just a teeny bit around the corner, and that gave a more pleasing look to the homeowner than previously when the paper was cut right into the corner. This fat cut works well in instances where the wall receiving wallpaper is next to a wall that has texture . Do a search here to see previous posts on fat cuts . The wallpaper is by Serena & Lily , and the pattern is called Priano . The home is in the Madera / Balmoral / Woodland Hills / Beltway 8 area of far northeast Houston .
Here, I’m hanging paper from right to left, and have just come around a corner , which is in the center of the picture. You almost never wrap wallpaper around an inside corner . Corners are never straight , and the paper will buckle in the corner . And the edge will not be straight , nor plumb , and thus the next strip won’t butt up perfectly against it . And it’s also probable that the strip will torque off either up or down, causing your pattern to creep up or down the ceiling and floor lines. The answer is to stop the strip of wallpaper in the corner , and cut a new piece for the subsequent wall. But you can’t just trim tightly to the corner. Because most likely there will be gaps (remember I said that corners are never straight?), so some of the wall will show. So what you do is wrap the paper just a teeny amount around the corner , and then overlap your new piece over that. This does mean that you will lose some of the pattern in that overlap. I can’t stand that pattern mis-match, so most of the time, the way I do it, I’ll take a fresh strip of wallpaper for the next strip (to be placed on the left in the photo) and trim it so the pattern matches as perfectly as possible. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the fat cut … In the photo, I’ve cut my strip on the left 1/2″ wider than needed to fit this wall. I don’t want this 1/2″ of wallpaper under my overlapped new strip, because the leaves a visible ridge. But you do want a little underlap, because you need that to prevent a gap from showing in the corner. So in the photo, I’ve trimmed off most of that 1/2″ and trimmed it down to an unnoticeable 1/8″. How on earth can you get a trim that thin and that consistent?!I use this handy metal plate with a rolled edge (on the left). This plate has bends and other edges of other thicknesses , rounded edges , won’t leave marks on wallpaper, so it has many uses.Here’s a close up of the trim guide edge that allows for that 1/8″ fat cut . Back side of the plate. (Don’t mind the blue tape – it’s just there temporarily.)This edge is a little thinner , and would cut too close for use in a corner. But it does have a use if you need a trim in an area where you don’t want the paper trimmed tightly into the edge / corner. You’re looking at where wallpaper meets crown molding. This join edge has gaps between the molding and the wall in some areas, and other areas have gunk and uneven areas. Trimming with my usual trim guide would cut too close and let some of these icky things show. So here I’ve used the thicker trim guide. As you can see, it allows the wallpaper to wrap ever so teeny much of a bit, so it covers the bad area, but doesn’t creep onto the molding. Here’s another example, along door molding. At the top, I used my usual thin trim guide (see below). But this allowed a bit of a gap to show, due to decades’ build up of paint , caulk , dirt , etc. So, midway, I switched to using the steel plate as a trim guide. This made the cut just fat enough that the wallpaper wrapped a hair and covered the icky area. Here’s my usual trim guide . I’m guessing it’s about 9″-12″ long . You can see that the edge is very thin . In most cases, this is ideal, because it allows for good, tight trims right smack into corners and edges. That steel plate shown above was invented by a colleague in the Wallcovering Installers Association ( WIA ) . They are all the same length, but they come with three different degrees of angles , and can be used for lots of wallpaper installation tasks . The colleagues has them manufactured and then sells them to us paperhangers . She sells other cool tools , too. If you’re interested in purchasing any of these , or seeing what else she has, go here https://www.facebook.com/customwallpapertools or here https://www.wallpapertoolstore.com/?fbclid=IwAR2NFrG2gWSzNClNMB0gHDiQHbnkhyNhthaOFQaK8MCaU7rBYVQhYQkO0nc Her name is Eunice , so we call them EuniTools .
For all the prospective clients who think they can pull out their calculator and slide rule and then meticulously calculate that they can cover their walls with 186.7 sq ft of wallpaper – WRONG!
Here is a good example of waste, and why you can’t purchase wallpaper based on square feet alone.
Here we are working with a non-woven material that is packaged in 21″ wide x 33′ long.
In the photo, that narrow 1″ wide strip of wall on the left needs to be covered with wallpaper.
That’s 1″ wide x 5′ tall. That comes out to .41 square feet of wallpaper.
Sounds negligible, doesn’t it? But in real life, a whole lot more wallpaper will be called into play – and tossed into the trash – in order to cover this miniscule space.
Although I stockpile all scraps, there is nothing in my remnant pile that is long enough, nor the correct pattern match, to cover this space.
So I must cut a new length from a bolt of wallpaper.
The pattern has a 25″ repeat, so I had to cut off almost this much in order to come up with the correct pattern match. That’s 25″ long x 21″ wide … so already, we are nearly 4 square feet cut off and thrown onto the trash pile.
Now that I have the pattern matched correctly, I need 5 running feet of it to cover the length of wall in the photo. That’s 60″ long x the 21″ wide width of the wallpaper. That calculates to 8.75 square feet of paper.
Of those 8.75 square feet, remember that I need only a 1″ wide strip. As previously mentioned, that comes to .41 square feet.
So, 8.75 sq ft – .41 sq ft = 8.33 sq ft of paper that can’t be used anywhere else, and will be tossed onto the discard pile.
That’s 8.33 sq ft of waste. Considering that the average single roll of wallpaper contains 28 square feet (but in reality, only 22 square feet of useable paper), this leaves you with only 19.75 square feet of useable paper.
In double roll speak, this means a bolt with 56 square feet, which is better calculated at 44 useable square feet, after hanging this one puny 1″ wide strip, you are left with 47.7 sq ft of useable paper – nearly 10 sq ft lost for just one 1″ wide strip!
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I haven’t even gotten into pattern repeats, trimming at ceiling and floor, going around windows, vaulted ceilings, stairs, multiple drops, expansion when wet with paste, and all sorts of other factors.
Bottom Line: We paperhangers know the ins and outs of this stuff.
And homeowners don’t. Nor do contractors, painters, handymen, nor even engineers. Most of all, NOT engineers. (I love ’em all,,,, but they tend to get bogged down in details, and overlook the grand scale.)
Bottom, Bottom Line: Let the paperhanger measure the space and calculate how much wallpaper to order.
I first saw this tool at the 2013 paperhangers’ convention, and it was lust at first sight. Earlier this year, I had an opportunity to buy one. It was designed by a member of the paperhangers’ guild (the Wallcovering Installers Association), and serves a number of purposes. The lady’s name is Eunice, so we call her tool a “Euni (or Uni) Tool.”
I’ll spare you the technical details and just focus on what I use it for mostly, which is a straight edge guide for double cutting wallpaper (splicing two pieces). There is a non-slip pad under the left edge, the pointy end allows you to get right up to the ceiling, and then you use the right edge as a guide when cutting. Today I used it when cutting through two layers of wallpaper, and also used it to cut through one layer, by butting it up against the next strip and then resting my blade against the edge of the trimmer.
In the bottom photo, you can see what a nice, tight seam this made.
We’re seeing more and more of this peel-and-stick, supposedly “removable” and “repositionable” plastic wallcovering. Unfortunately, many homeowners read the lofty claims by the manufacturers and think it will be a perfect alternative to traditional wallpaper. It is not.
The stuff is awful – I won’t hang it, and most of my friends won’t either.
First of all, you don’t NEED an alternative to traditional wallpaper – you just need quality paper and someone who will properly prep the walls and then properly install the paper.
Getting back to P&S, the stuff is virtually impossible to hang. Imagine a 9’x2′ strip of Contact Paper, trying to position that on a wall without it wrinkling or sticking to itself, and then trying to butt another strip up next to it. Not gonna happen. It also does not “remove easily” … well, it does, but it will tear your wall apart in the process.
These homeowners had some guys doing other work in the nursery, and they said they could hang the wallpaper, too. They weren’t experienced paperhangers, and they weren’t up to the battle against this P&S. Virtually no one is.
First, they should have smoothed out the textured wall. Second, most P&S products spec that the wall should be sealed with a semi-gloss paint, which needs to dry and cure for two weeks. As you can see, this adds time and labor charges to the job.
I’m not sure why there are gaps at the seams (top two photos), but better prep would surely have helped prevent this. The large wrinkles are due to the inflexiblity of the material and its unwillingness to twist or stretch into position. With the baby on the way, the homeowner dad got desperate and used nails to try to tack down the curling paper.
The baby girl arrived, the parents lived with this wall for a while, and, when life settled down, they contacted me. I counseled them to forget the P&S and to choose a traditional wallpaper.
They zoomed in on this butterfly pattern by SuperFresco. This material is one of the newish non-woven materials, which contain a component of fiberglass and thus don’t expand or shrink, and won’t tug at the wall, so fewer worries of seems popping loose. These qualities also make it possible to dry-hang the paper, by pasting the wall instead of pasting the paper. I usually paste the paper, but on a single accent wall such as this (no toilets or sinks or fancy moldings to work around), pasting the wall works beautifully. It also saved me lugging my heavy, bulky work table up to this townhome’s third floor. 🙂
Removing the P&S paper was easy – it is strong and held together while I tugged it off the wall … I could do it all from the floor, without even climbing the ladder. Unfortunately, it took much of the paint along with it. So much for the “removable” claim.
It was still as sticky as the day it was born – so I rolled it all up and stuck it to itself and tossed the whole mess into the trash. Done and gone!
I skim-floated the wall to smooth it, sanded smooth, vacuumed, wiped residual dust off the wall with a damp sponge, and then rolled on Gardz, a penetrating primer-sealer, that also is a great undercoat for wallpaper.
All that (especially waiting for the smoothing compound to dry) took several hours. I think it was about 6:00 before I started hanging wallpaper!
Thin non-wovens generally go up with pleasingly invisible seams, and this one did, too. I was surprised to discover more than a few large wrinkles and bubbles. This could have been because the paper got twisted during installation, because the wall was smooth but not flat, because of some uneven reaction between the substrate and the paste which caused off-gassing (burps!), or some other reason. But it meant that I had to go over the wall several times, checking to be sure all areas were firmly secured to the wall.
The finished accent wall looks great! It’s a gentler pattern and a quieter color, and doesn’t hit you in the face as the original floral pattern did. There’s a little bit of fun shimmer in the scattered pearlized butterflies, and the blue-grey wings coordinate nicely with the three grey walls in the rest of the room.
Finally, Baby Girl is ready to move into her own room!
See the color difference between the two strips in the first photo? And see the darker line at the seam in the second photo? Not to worry…
You are not seeing two different runs on the wall… the color difference in the first shot is due to the first strip is drier than the second one.
In the second photo, water has entered the paper through the edge, causing a darker color.
In both cases, once the paper dries, it will be uniform color. In fact, the manufacturer was on the ball enough to mention this in the instruction sheet.
That was important, because there is a phenomenon called “staining” or “blushing” caused by some pastes interacting with some wallpapers. It can look pretty much the same, but it won’t dry and disappear. Avoiding certain pastes can help prevent that.
All the same, we paperhangers can be mighty nervous until the paper is good and dry.
There are some wallpapers that can be marred by metal… In the photo, I have purposely run a metal trim guide over the surface, so you can see how it looks.
The bad news is, we paperhangers use a lot of metal items – scissors, trim guide, smoother, and even things like a ring or bracelet could leave a mark, and even my expensive magnesium straightedge, which I bought because magnesium supposedly will not leave marks on paper, will, in fact, leave grey marks where it moves against the paper.
The good news is that most of the time, these marks will wipe off the surface with gentle rubbing with a damp cloth. Of course, you don’t want to overdo that.
The other good news is that, with some extra attention, it is possible to avoid most of these blemishes. Leave your jewelry at home. Blue painter’s tape will seal off the ends of the straightedge, and plastic trim guides can be substituted for metal for some tasks. And care should be taken when using scissors and other equipment to not slide it across the surface of the paper.
This wall in the dining room of a very contemporary new home in the Spring Branch area of Houston “floats” in the middle of the room. This breath of smoke floating across the wall adds a distinctly ethereal feel.
The interior designer on this job is Neal LeBouef, of L Design Group, who was expertly assisted by Anthony Stransky. I love working for these guys. And homeowners love their creations, which are crisp, sleek, modern, a bit edgy, yet still warm and comfortable.
The smoke mural was custom made to fit the wall, and came from Murals Your Way https://www.muralsyourway.com/ , a member of the Wallcovering Installers Association (WIA). Their murals can be printed on various materials, and I chose the vinyl on an Osnaburg backing.
Each of the three panels was about 42″ wide, and they were meant to be overlapped and then double-cut (spliced) at the seams. Great care was taken to not get paste on either the surface of the mural or on the ceiling, and to not score the wall while splicing.
I have a specially made 2 1/2″ wide plastic tape that keeps paste off surfaces, and another special 2″ wide polystyrene plastic strip that protects the wall from cuts from the razor blade, and a specially made non-slip straightedge used as a guide while trimming. All of these were invented and made by fellow members of the WIA (Steve Boggess and Eunice Bokstrom). Probably boring for the average blog-reader, but exciting stuff for us paperhangers. These things really helped make this job turn out perfect.
I am just a few days back from the wallpaperhangers’ convention in New Orleans. (classes, demos, networking, product showcase, etc.) At our closing event, they gave out these little kits. I grabbed a few, intended for holiday stocking stuffers…. But mine has already come in handy… I used the tweezers to remove a splinter from the grasscloth I hung today. 🙂
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