Before. Textured wall will be smoothed and primed . Here I’m applying primer to the glossy wall , so the smoothing compound will adhere . Done.
Classic and elegant, this has all the traditional features – birds , butterflies , blooms , branches , aqua-blue sky , and critters running along the bottom ground portion . Chinoiserie means Oriental in theme and feel.
This was a 5-panel mural , but came in one long roll . It also has an un-trimmed selvedge edge that has to be trimmed off by hand . That’s the white border you see on either side. Here I am on the floor in an adjoining room (homeowner kindly removed the furniture so I’d have space to do this) rolling the material out . I’m using a scissors to separate the five panels , and also to roughly remove the excess material on either side of the panels . The panels will be trimmed more precisely while on my table , with a 76″ long straightedge and single edge razor blades . Dang – forgot to get pics!
Lining the panels up next to each other, to ensure sequence of placement . And to be sure the pattern match is correct. And to check measurements . The panels came 10′ high, and the wall was a little less than 9′. That meant that we’d have to lose about a foot of length . I chose to trim off more from the top, which was mostly blank blue sky . This left us most of the green portion at the bottom, with its hills and partridges and pheasants . On the upper right, you see I’ve trimmed off the top 6.5″ of material . This makes the strip shorter , and thus easier to handle when going to the wall . And also reduces the area that will overhang the crown molding at the top of the wall – so less paste gets slopped around and less paste to wipe off . Murals come in panels of one design per panel . Meaning, if something gets screwed up , there is no other panel to use . And, unlike traditional rolled goods , there is no repetitive pattern to roll off and use to start a new strip . Believe me, before cutting off that top 6.5″ , I did a lot of measuring and calculating and plotting. As the saying goes: ” Measure twice , cut once .”
Finished view with more light than in previous photo .
This is the first time I’ve hung this brand , and the material was unfamiliar to me. To be honest, the substrate and surface felt a bit odd to me. So I used one of those cut-off tops of the panels to paste and hang a test strip . It went up OK . But 10 minutes later , I looked at it and there was a large bubble . Small bubbles you can expect to disappear as the paper dries . But this was a pretty large (3″ round) bubble. It was easy enough to use a razor blade to pop a hole for air to escape, and then use a squeegee tool to chase it out. But it was indicative of what was to come, because when I got to installing the actual strips / panels , most of them developed large bubbles , too. Needless to say, I wasn’t crazy about this material / brand .
Finished wall, again. The mural came in maybe 10-12 panels . You could choose which panels you wanted (as long as they were in sequence , to ensure the pattern matched across the panels ). The homeowner liked the flowers and birds , as well as the height of the pattern , on certain panels. So she chose panels #6 – #10. This worked out beautifully for this wall area . For one thing, the branches arch to the right and then to the left , and meet pretty much at the top center of the wall. This makes for a nicely framed and centered image . Note that the fifth panel (#10) on the far right, is over the door. So about 2′ was used over the door, and about 7′ of the bottom portion got cut off. Usually this just goes into the trash . But the homeowner had the idea of framing this scrap as artwork and hanging on an adjoining or nearby wall . This is a fabulous idea, as it will repeat the colors and theme of the dining room accent wall into other, nearby, area(s) of the house. As well as keep that unused 7′ length of paper out of the trash pile . Close up .
Note how the artists recreated the look of actual hand-painted and hand-sewn silk mural panels , by including the illusion of squares of silk sewn together. The “real deal” murals by the likes of de Gournay and Gracie and Fromental can cost as much as $2,000 per panel . Just for the material. Tons more for installation .
The brand is Mural Source . The pattern is called Belva in the Spring colorway . As mentioned, I wasn’t crazy about the vinyl material or the backing / substrate . The vinyl was thick and flexible . ‘Flexible’ sounds good , but in this case, it meant stretching and warping . And the backing, which was supposedly non-woven , and which the mfgr advised could be hung by pasting the wall , stretched and expanded … oh, and let’s not forget those large bubbles . Also, with panels being 37″ wide, it was difficult to position the strips , match the pattern , and work out the warps and wrinkles . There are plenty of other companies making similar designs that are of better (IMO) material content . And that don’t require the tedious and painstaking hand-trimming of the edges – 1080″ at last count! (1.7% of a mile – I couldn’t resist ‘doing the math’!) RebelWalls.com is one company that I like a lot. But, in the end, the wall looks great and the homeowner is thrilled. It adds a whole new dimension of elegance and classic feel to a fairly modern home with a young family with three kids under 10.
Panel of wallpaper lying on my pasting table. The left edge will go up against a painted wall that is not to be wallpapered. It’s important to keep paste off this wall, because the paste can cause the paint to crackle and flake off. Yes, you can wipe paste off the wall, especially if it’s a gloss paint. But better to not get paste on the wall in the first place. So I’ve placed a strip of this cool blue plastic tape along the edge. It sticks to the pasted wallpaper, but will not let paste get onto the wall. Here is the wallpaper in place, with the little 1″ overage wrapping onto the wall to the left. See how the blue tape is preventing paste from getting onto the wall? Once I finish trimming, I will remove both the excess paper and the blue tape. Be sure to remove any blue tape that is still behind the wallpaper. This also works for ceilings and for abutting another strip of wallpaper. This tape is much better than painter’s plastic or ” caution tape ” because it is lightly tinted so you can see it, it’s translucent so you can see through it, it has the perfect body – thicker than painter’s plastic but more flexible than caution tape, and has a unique textured surface that makes it handle nicely, plus you can easily snap it apart so there is no need for scissors or razor blades. It’s made in Japan and tricky to get. If you’re interested, email me at wallpaperlady@att.net and I’ll hook you up with the supplier. The very edgy wallpaper? It’s by Spoonflower and called Serpents and Apples .
The mortar along the top of this marble tile baseboard was light colored, and I didn’t think it would look good between the black tile and the mostly-dark wallpaper. In addition, I hate trimming wallpaper against grout, because the gritty texture makes it hard to get a neat cut. And that sandy grout sure eats up my razor blades!So I applied a thin layer of joint compound over the grout, sanded it smooth, and then sealed with a penetrating primer called Gardz. This gave me a softer surface to trim against. But I was still left with a white edge. That’s what you see in the top photo. So next I used an angled artist’s brush and some black craft paint from Texas Art Supply hobby store to change the white line to black. Here’s what it looks like finished.
This sign was posted on the door at eye level when I visited Sherwin-Williams today.
The COVID-induced shipping container jam-up, driver shortages, fires and freezes at chemical plants – all these contribute to the lack of supplies in stores.
Luckily for me, as a wallpaper installer, few of the items I use have been affected.
To be honest, I don’t mind paying a bit more for materials. I’m mostly concerned about being able to obtain what I need to get my clients’ paper up on their walls!
Mostly I use primer, paste, and smoothing compound, plus razor blades. Luckily, all of these remain available in my Houston area. Sherwin-Williams is doing a great job of keeping me supplied!
Just in case, though, I’ve got a (small) stockpile in my garage. Just enough to get through a month or so, if needed. I don’t want to hoard and prevent someone else from taking care of his own clients.
Well, this was a first for me. I can’t say that I remember having a grasscloth that stretched and warped out of shape this badly.
What’s odd is that, after I pasted and booked the wallpaper, it was perfectly lined up and flat. It was only after the paper had sat for the resting period, and then I unfolded it and took it to the wall, that it started warping out of shape.
My first strip laid against the wall nice and flat, but did not line up against my laser level’s red beam, moving to the left the farther down the wall the strip went. The subsequent strip to its right, naturally, would not butt up against the first strip. However, this second strip did line up against the laser plumb line, on both the right and left sides. So I left it on the wall.
But I had to tear off and discard that first strip.
I had problems with many of the strips. As you can see, there was major warping and wrinkling. I was unable to smooth out most of these warps.
Some of my colleagues have suggested that my trimmed edges were not straight. And I admit that I sense that my ($200!) straightedge is not true (perfectly straight). But a 1/8″ discrepancy over a 9′ drop should not result in wrinkles of this magnitude.
I think that the substrate that S&L is using is absorbing moisture from the paste unevenly, and thus creating the warps and twists.
The only way I could make this work was to do a double-cut (spliced seam). I smoothed the grasscloth onto the wall as best I could, even though both the right and left edges still presented wrinkles.
I carefully pulled away from the wall the left edge of the previous strip (having applied extra paste, to keep everything wet and “open”). Between that edge of the strip and the wall, I placed a “Boggess Strip,” (invented by a fellow WIA member) which is a thin strip of 2″ wide polyethelyne plastic, that will protect the wall from my razor blade.
Now hanging the next grasscloth strip, I then covered the underside of the right (wrinkled) edge with blue plastic tape (also invented by the same WIA genius member). This would keep paste off the surface of the strip I was overlapping it onto. Then I smoothed the paper onto the wall, allowing the right side of the strip to overlap on top of the previous strip, by 1.5″.
I worked out wrinkles as best as I could, but some insisted on remaining. I then took my EuniTool straightedge (invented by yet another WIA member), and used it as a guide, along with the red light line from my laser level, and a new, fresh razor blade, to cut a straight, plumb line between the edges of the two strips.
The grasscloth was thick, and I had to press really hard to cut through both layers. The Boggess strip prevented scoring into the wall. This is important, because an un-intact wall can delaminate under the stress of drying / shrinking wallpaper, and this can cause the seams to pop open.
Back to the double-cut. Once the cut was done, I removed the plastic Boggess strip from the wall, and the protective blue plastic tape from the edge of the grasscloth, as well as the two excess strips of paper that I had just cut off. (Do a Search here to see pics and read more about the double cut / splice process.)
I could then smooth the newly-cut edges of the two strips together.
All this takes a lot of time.
I still had more strips to hang – and each required the same procedure. You only have so much “open” time before a piece of wallpaper starts sticking to the wall and cannot be jacked around with anymore.
I had to jump to the left edge of the current strip I was working with, and add a Boggess strip behind it. And then I had to paste and book my next strip, and apply some blue tape to the area that would overlap the previous strip. Wait a few minutes for it to book and absorb the paste.
Then repeat the double cutting procedure used on the first strip.
All this caught me off guard, and it threw off my engineering of the wall and my planned width of the strips. It also took a lot more time … I spent 5 hours hanging just these 5 strips.
Bottom line – I got ‘er done … But I am definitely NOT going to recommend Serena & Lily grasscloth to future clients.
And I am VERY grateful to my WIA colleagues for inventing tools and gadgets that help with these tricky situations, which I’m glad I bought and had stashed in my van, and for sharing their knowledge and experiences so I knew what techniques I might try.
This wallpaper is by Anderson Prints. It was more than a little difficult to work with. I hung it in two different colorways, and both were equally cantankerous.
~ Top photo – see the streak of darker color at the tip of my scissors? This defect ruined a 9′ strip of paper.
~ Second photo – look at the left edge of the toilet, from that corner up to the ceiling … see the darker color? Every strip showed a little darker color at the edges. Close up, you don’t notice it, but from a distance, there is a vertical line that catches your eye. This is on every seam, in both colorways. So, from a distance, you see this faint but noticeable vertical line every 27″, all across the room.
~ The substrate sucks up paste, enough so that after pasting and booking for a few minutes, by the time I got it to the wall, there was virtually no paste left to hold it up, and absolutely no paste on the edges. I tried several tricks – rolling paste under the seams, spritzing the edges with water, dipping the edges of the booked strips into water to keep them hydrated, unbooking and repasting, unbooking and spraying the back lightly with water to reactivate the paste, and finally, the best option was to paste the back as normal, but use a squirt bottle to add a bit of water, and then cut the booking time a little.
~ No matter which pasting technique was used, particularly on the tan colorway, in some areas where the ink crossed the seam, the paper wanted to curl back and leave a tiny gap.
~ The pattern matched in most areas, but dropped a little in some of the motifs, resulting in a mis-match. Then it would match up perfectly again as you went further down the wall.
~ The paper, particularly the silver colorway, twisted and warped horribly. I would butt a strip up against the previous strip, matching the pattern, then go to smooth the rest of the strip against the wall – only to find HUGE puckers and warps. OK, you can tease away minor wrinkles. But when you have several warped areas that are each protruding 1/2″ away from the wall, it’s really difficult to get that strip of paper to lie flat against the wall. I spent at least 20 minutes working and easing the puckers out of one strip and getting the paper to lie flat. To be honest, I’m astonished that I was able to do that. This particular wall had only three 7′ high strips … Because the warping increases as you hang subsequent strips, if I had had to hang many strips in a row, and taller strips, such as on a bedroom accent wall, I don’t think it could have been done without making some relief cuts or double cuts and resulting in some serious pattern mis-matching.
~ The tan colorway was reasonably durable, plus minor creases would pretty much disappear when the paste dried and the paper pulled flat to the wall. But the silver colorway was very delicate, and was prone to creasing at the drop of a hat. Don’t fold it, don’t wet-trim it, unbooking a pasted strip was very likely to cause a crease, and ditto when pressing the paper into a corner to trim … and working around that toilet was the prime area to put stress on the paper and cause more creases. This toilet was butted up against the wall, so it was impossible to slip the paper behind it, so it was necessary to cut the paper to fit around it. That’s hard enough to do with an electrical outlet that protrudes a half an inch from the wall, but veeery difficult when you have something as three-dimensional as a toilet. I must have spent the better part of an hour working the paper around and behind and under that toilet. Note to Self: Next time, make the homeowner pull the toilet out of the room!
~ The silver colorway had a metallic sheen, and every way the light hit it made the pattern look different. It was literally impossible to see the pattern match in some instances, particularly when turning a corner. What looked like a tan line on the right wall would literally show up as a silver line on the left wall. Look at all the horizontal and vertical lines in this design… It was virtually impossible to tell if I had the right line matching up with its proper partner. Trimming on the table (such as when I needed to split a strip) was equally difficult. I was just about impossible to tell design from shadow, and to know if I was cutting straight along the pattern.
~ Metal left marks on the paper. So I had to be very careful while using my straightedge, as well as other tools such as scissors, trim guide, etc.
~ The paper wouldn’t slide around on the wall as most do, so it was difficult to get each strip perfectly positioned.
~ It ate razor blades like crazy. The paper somehow dulled blades faster than even heavy vinyls.
~ When I cut a strip off the bolt, it wanted to stay rolled up. This made it very difficult to trim or paste the strip. So I had to roll all the strips backwards, until the paper relaxed and got rid of the “memory” to curl.
Most of these issues have to do with the substrate used by the manufacturer, but toss in the metallic ink and whatever engineer screwed up the pattern match.
I don’t like covering switch plates or outlet covers with wallpaper, nor things like air conditioner grills. They get dirty when hands touch them, no adhesive wants to stick to them, they just look better the way God created them. So don’t tell anyone that I did this….
This exhaust fan was oddly stuck smack in the line of sight, in the wall next to the toilet. (Most are mounted inconspicuously in the ceiling.) It just kept bugging me. Since the family was out of town and I had plenty of peace and quiet and time, I decided to give ‘er a go … I plopped down on the floor and spent a good 45 minutes with a handful of new razor blades and cut out all these tiny vent slits.
It looks good.
I hope it holds up. Wallpaper adhesive is not formulated to stick to plastic. But it’s all I had with me. I did use sandpaper to scuff up the surface of the plastic vent cover, and also used a bit of adhesive caulk – one of my secrete weapons – in a few areas that were reachable (couldn’t get down into the recessed areas). So hopefully there will be some chance for the paste to grab ahold.
The end result was worth the effort. Now you barely notice the exhaust fan.
So, O.K., it’s a hard room to photograph. All I can show you is the papered wall behind the beautiful light fixture and the really cool mirror.
This wallpaper is embedded with tiny glass beads, which give it dimension, texture and sparkle. In the 2nd photo, you can see how the beads shimmer when the light hits them.
This wallpaper is by Antonia Vella, for York Wallcoverings. It is a non-woven material and is a paste-the-wall product. It is very thick and stiff, and difficult to manipulate, and very hard to cut through, especially the beads. Used lots of razor blades today.
I hung it in a powder room in the Rice Military neighborhood of Houston. The interior designer is Pamela O’Brien of Pamela Hope designs.
This “Martinique” (French island in the Caribbean), wallpaper pattern is the exact same as was used in the ’40’s in the Beverly Hills Hotel – and on TV shows like Friends and the Golden Girls, and in celebrities’ homes, and on a Mariah Carey album cover, to name a few. I have hung it several times – it is retro, it is timeless, and people love it.
It is also expensive. And thus there are knock-offs. Most of the knock-offs are easier to hang. This one was not.
While most wallpapers these days come pre-trimmed by the factory, this paper came with a selvedge edge, which I had to trim off by hand with a 6′ straight edge and plenty of sharp razor blades. I spent maybe an hour and a half just trimming the edges off six strips of wallpaper. And the trim mark arrows printed by the manufacturer were not distinct, so it was hard to tell exactly where to cut, which means it was easy to get an edge that was not perfectly straight. That means you can get perfectly butted seams, but also what we call “gaps and overlaps.” In addition, the pattern was not perfectly matched by the manufacturer, so there were some slight mis-matches once on the wall. Luckily, the pattern is busy enough that these are pretty disguised.
The paper had a thick vinyl coating that was difficult to cut. The thick manila paper backing sucked up paste, leaving little to hold the paper to the wall. The paper backing opposed the vinyl surface, causing curling at the seams. I added extra paste, I added more moisture, I striped the wall behind seams with paste, but I still had seams that wanted to curl up a little. Usually, once the paper is good and dry, the seams give up their moisture and that causes them to shrink, and then they pull tight to the wall. By the time I left, most of the seams were tight and flat.
In the end, the finished wall looks fantastic, and the homeowner loves it.
I put this bright and bold “Martinique” wallpaper pattern on an accent (headboard) wall in a guest bedroom in a new home in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston.
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