Weird Water Supply Line On/Off

Here is the water line as it comes out of the wall and leads to the toilet in this powder room in Houston.
Usually this line or pipe is accompanied by a faucet handle, which you can turn to either turn on or shut off water to the toilet.
But this is the first time I’ve ever seen this different method of controlling the water flow.
Instead of turning a handle, you pull the small plug and it closes the pipe and shuts off the water.
Or, push the knob in and it will open up the lines and let water flow.
The round silver plate against the wall is decorative for hiding the hole in the wall. This plate is called an escutcheon .

Patching a Hole Around a Pipe

You’re looking at a water supply line underneath a pedestal sink in a powder room.
This hole is a little wide, and offers the wallpaper nothing to adhere to. In addition, there is no escutcheon (decorative plate) to hide the hole.

I took some special paper and cut a ” collar ” to fit around the pipe and also cover the hole.

I dipped the “collar” into Gardz . This is cool stuff. It soaks in to porous surfaces, adheres to surfaces, and dries hard.

Here is the patch in place. Once it’s dry, I’ll skim-float with joint compound (” mud “) and then sand smooth.
The finished product will be a smooth, intact surface for the wallpaper to adhere to, with only a tiny gap around the plumbing.

Wall-Mounted Faucet And Handles Job, Pt. II

Wrestling a full strip of wallpaper around the whole wall, around the mirror, and then around those faucets would have been extremely cumbersome, would have slopped paste all over the mirror, and would have risked tearing or creasing the paper. So I decided to trim the paper down so I could place it just under and above the mirror. I placed the strips on the wall, making sure that the orange stripes were equidistant from the left and the right walls, and making sure that they were perfectly plumb. To get around that faucet, I sliced the paper vertically at the mid point. I used a scissors to cut half-circles around the faucet, and to cut holes for the handles. I had to leave enough room for the plumber to work, but not make the holes too large. As it was, the faucet escutcheon (gold ring back plate) just barely covered the hole I cut in the wallpaper. The striped pattern made this easier, but you could do the same thing with another type of design; you’d have to choose where to make your slices.

Done. Waiting for the plumber to reattach the handles and back plates.

Finished. (In the mirror you’re seeing a reflection of the linen cabinet on the opposite wall.) I used a similar technique to get around the drain pipe under the sink. I also had to make sure the stripes were centered on the wall, and lined up with the stripes above the vanity. This area was a bit easier because I didn’t have to work around a mirror. Still, this one wall took me about two and a half hours. !!

Nice Try – But A Miss

Top photo: The plumber removed a wall-mounted faucet and handle, to make it easier for me to hang the wallpaper around this area. This would also eliminate a lot of “relief cuts” that I would need to make in order to fit the paper around these obstacles.

The only problem is … He removed a faucet that protrudes 10″ from the wall. And he capped it off with a pipe and nipple that stick out 7″ ! AND … He was unable to remove the handle escutcheon at all.

So … I still had to make multiple relief cuts in order to fit the wallpaper around these objects and flat to the wall. And now the wallpaper sits around the escutcheon, rather than behind it, so there is the worry that splashed water may find its way in behind the wallpaper, and potentially cause it to curl away from the wall.

The second photo shows another job where the plumber removed the faucet and handles all the way down to the stems. So I was able to fit the paper tightly to the pipes. The new fixtures will cover the holes and the wallpaper, eliminating any worries about water causing the paper to come loose.

Serena & Lily “Feather” In Boy’s Bedroom

I like Serena & Lily papers, and their “Feather” is one of their most popular. Here it is in navy in the bedroom of a young boy in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston.

The room presented some challenges, but the pattern was accommodating. It took a whole lot of time, but when I finished, it looked great.

The 4-square house was built about 1920. In the ensuing years, the house has shifted. Which is a nice way of saying that the floors and ceilings are not level, and the walls are not plumb.

I started to center the pattern on a plumb line between the two windows. But a plumb line is plumb, and the window moldings were not, so the wallpaper pattern would have started going crooked along the windows and ceilings. So instead of lining my first strip up against a plumb line, I carefully placed it to straddle an area equidistant between the two windows.

This took a lot of measuring, a lot of repositioning, and a lot of trips up and down the ladder. And, yes, I even had the strip in place, trimmed, and done – and then realized that it was a tad off. So I pulled it off the wall and moved it over by a scant 3/16 of an inch. The effort paid off, because, as you can see in the first photo, the design is perfectly centered between the two windows, from ceiling to floor.

The next full strip hung to the right of the window on the right (no photo). This wall was way off-plumb, and was shaped more like a trapezoid than a rectangle. My job was to keep the pattern looking straight along the window frame on its left, as well as straight along the door frame to its right.

The only way I could do this was to slice the strip apart vertically, cutting along the vertical “stripes” in the design. Then I aligned the pattern to the left and right moldings. In between, I overlapped the “stripes,” distributing the discrepancy in widths between the sections. In this way, I accommodated for more than an inch of difference in width between the top and bottom of the wall. This did create a slight vertical ridge under the stripes, but it was disguised by the stripes themselves. And a little difference in thickness of the wallpaper looks a whole lot better than a crooked pattern.

To the right of that was a wide closet door. I hung the three strips over the door, and the pattern was placed perfectly. Yet when I stepped back and looked at it, the design looked horribly crooked.

I finally figured out that the ceiling and door moldings were not perfectly perpendicular to each other. In fact, there was a full 3/4″ difference in height between the left and right side of the area. This trapezoid shape was causing the strips to look crooked, even if they were not.

Again, my solution was to cut the paper apart vertically along the “stripes,” and overlap as needed, to make my strips look plumb.

I employed this trick as needed in other areas of the room.

The design itself was very helpful. The vertical “stripes” were not straight, so nothing had to be exactly-dactly straight or plumb. And the “V”s at the top of the wall were also irregular, as were the positioning of the diagonal lines, so I had flexibility in how high or low to place my pattern.

Throwing another wrench into the works was the fact that we had two different runs to work with (do a Search here to learn about that), plus one double roll bolt that was defective and could not be used, which meant I had to figure out how to make 10 rolls cover 12 rolls’ worth of wall space.

Another obstacle was placing the wallpaper against the stained shiplap wall – without getting paste onto the rough, un-cleanable wood. And let’s not forget to mention the “industrial” metal pipe that hung 1/2″ from the wall I was papering.

I used two tricks for this. One was using my Boggess blue cut tape to protect the wooden wall. The other again involved using the trim-along-the-stripe-and-overlap-new-strip-as-needed technique. Too intricate to explain, especially without photos. But it was a good trick and the perfect solution to ending the paper at the wooden wall.

Sounds complicated. It WAS! It took me 10 hours (3+ hours per wall) to get these 10 single rolls up.

When all was said and done, though, the room looked fantastic. All ready for the young boy to move in!

Other parts of the room have a heavy “industrial modern” look – exposed pipe, weathered metal light fixtures, unpainted original shiplap wood. The interior designer is Stacie Cokinos of Cokinos Design.

What Does A Plumbing Repair Have To Do With Wallpaper?

Thursday, I hung grasscloth on three walls of this master bedroom, and left for the night. When I arrived on Friday to finish the last wall, the homeowner hustled me into the adjoining bathroom and showed me where a repair had been done to the toilet’s water intake line the previous night.

By freak accident, some decorative item had fallen off the toilet tank and hit the water intake pipe “just so.” The pipe was of plastic, and had a few weaknesses in it. So when it was struck in just the right (or wrong!) place, it broke – and spewed water everywhere!

Luckily, the homeowner was home and caught this immediately. And, luckily, there is a neighborhood “guy” in the Heights (Inner Loop neighborhood of Houston) who is able and willing to come out at any hour to fix things like this.

Fixing it has to do with accessing the plumbing pipes. And that has to do with cutting into the wall.

Eeeek!

The homeowner was freaking out, that the plumber might have to access the pipe from the other side of the wall – the wall that I had just hung her beautiful new $$ grasscloth wallpaper on!

A cut through the drywall here would have necessitated replacing the entire strip of wallpaper. And because of how grasscloth is trimmed to fit specific dimensions, and because of the color differences between bolts and strips, it would have looked better to have replaced all the strips on the wall.

Major hassle, major work involved, and it would have used up all our “extra” paper.

Luckily, the plumber was able to fix the pipe by cutting through from the bathroom side.

The homeowner still has to get someone to come repair the drywall and paint. But VERY lucky that no other repairs had to be done.

And SO lucky that the homeowner was on-site, and knew to cut off the water to the house. If the leak had run for an hour – not to mention overnight or over a weekend – much more would have been damaged… Not just my new wallpaper, but the hardwood floors, moldings, insulation, possibly drywall and possibly furniture, and more.