Blessed Help From The Plumber Makes For A Better Wallpaper Outcome

This powder room in a contemporary-styled home has wall-mounted handles and faucet that protruded from the wall several inches.

When I first visited the home for an initial consultation, I explained that making “relief cuts” in the wallpaper in order to work around these fixtures would result in lots of slits in the wallpaper … which could be visible, and which also would potentially provide openings that could allow splashed water to wick in behind the wallpaper and cause it to come away from the wall.

The homeowners arranged to have a plumber come in and remove the fixtures.

This allowed me to hang the paper much more easily, and saved me about an hour. But most important, it eliminated all the cuts and slits, and the potential problems mentioned above.

I kept the holes as tight to the plumbing stems as possible, to eliminate any gaps between the wallpaper and the fixtures. When the plumber comes back to reinstall the handles and faucet, if need be, he can easily take a scissors or blade and enlarge the holes a bit.

Crooked Walls = Wrinkly Paper

Digital Image

Digital Image

Walls in homes are usually never perfectly plumb, just as ceilings and floors are never perfectly level. Not a problem if you’re painting. But if you are hanging wallpaper, that wallpaper wants to hang straight, and so it wants a straight wall to hang on to.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that if a wall is crooked, bowed, or off-plumb, wallpaper will have difficulty hanging butted up against it.

In this case, I had turned a strip of wallpaper around an outside corner – very tricky for several reasons, and more so because virtually no outside corner is perfectly plumb, which compounds the trickiness. If you wrap wallpaper around a wall / corner that is not plumb / straight, the far edge of the wallpaper will likewise become bowed or un-straight. So when you go to butt the next strip of wallpaper against this one, one straight edge will not be able to find another straight edge to “marry with,” and the strips will want to gap or overlap. Not good.

So what I did was, once I got around the outside corner, I made sure that the far edge of the strip of wallpaper was plumb and straight. I used a 6′ magnesium straightedge and a 4′ level as guides.

But making the far edge of the wallpaper strip comply to plumb caused the body, or central area, of the wallpaper strip to become wrinkled due to excess material. Thankfully, this was a forgiving pattern.

What I did was, I cut along some lines of the wallpaper design motif. This created some relief, so I could ease out the wrinkles and smooth the paper against the wall. Voilà! The wrinkles and stress on the paper are gone; cuts, splices, and overlaps are invisible, and the the far edge of the paper is straight and ready to butt against the next strip of wallpaper.