Activating Adhesive on Pre-Pasted Mural Wallpaper

Mural panels standing on edge are cut, sequenced, staged, and ready to be pasted.
The panel lying on the floor will be my last strip, and will need to be measured and trimmed narrower before it’s ready to be pasted or hung.

I use several different methods to paste pre-pasted wallpaper, and you can do a Search here to read more.
But for today, I’m using the tried-and-true historic method of running the strip quickly through a water tray .
At the top of the photo, several strips have already been submerged and pulled through the water, then folded pasted-side-to-pasted-side. This is called booking .
Booking allows the adhesive on the back of the wallpaper to absorb the water and become activated. And it allows the wallpaper substrate to absorb moisture, expand, and then contract a little.
This method can sometimes get the material a little too wet, which can lead to over-expansion and then bubbles on the wall. That’s why I’ve placed the booked strips at a slant and over the bucket – so excess water can drain off.
Usually I paste and book one strip and then paste and book the next strip. While I’m hanging one, the second one is booking and waiting its turn to be hung. But with this water tray method and certain brands of pre-pasted material, such as Anewall , York , or Sure Strip , the paper sometimes gets so wet that it needs more time to dry before attempting to hang. So I’m pasting more strips at a time, so they can be drying out a bit while I hang the first strips.
There’s a bit of a risk to this, which is the potential for the paper to over-expand as it sits wet waiting to be hung. Then once it’s on the wall and starts to dry, it can shrink. All wallpaper shrinks when it dries. But if it has expanded too much, then when it dries and shrinks, you can be left with small gaps at the seams. Again, gaps are common with all wallpapers (most all), but can be exaggerated when dealing with over-saturated pre-pasted material as it shrinks.
Back to the method … You see the water tray, filled 3/4 full with clean water. I’ve set it on towels, which are in turn set on top of a thick plastic clear shower curtain. And that’s on top of my usual dropcloths, which are absorbent on the top (blue) side and water-proof on the underside. All this keeps any splashed water from getting onto the clients’ floors.
I also sometimes set the water tray in a bathtub, with towels set over the edge of the tub and on the floor.

More Pics of Yesterday’s Bathroom

Looking through the sink room into the wet room. What a serene look. The bold, monochromatic, shower curtain is a nice foil to the soft wallpaper.

This wallpaper pattern is called Woodland and is by Crown Wallcoverings.

A Light Update, Medieval Feel

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This bathroom started out with a rose-colored faux-finish paper. Very nice in its day (it was put up 12 years ago), but the homeowners were ready for an update. The new selection is also on a faux-finish background, but the coppery-brown colors are more neutral, and there is a scratchy, weathered-looking medallion pattern that adds interest, along with a bit of an old-world feel.

The homeowner chose the paper partly because it went with her existing shower curtain (tropical, not shown) and window valance (floral, shown). But once the first strips of the new wallpaper went up, it was evident that the old fabrics were not going to work. (I knew that all along, but just kept mum. 🙂 )

In fact, the homeowner agreed with me that the window looked better with no valance at all, just the shutters. Then she went digging through her linen closet and came up with a textured, cream-colored shower curtain that perfectly matched the color of the woodwork but had no distracting pattern; it looked great next to the brown metallic wallpaper.

The homeowner will keep her original mirror (sorry, no photo, but it is hand-painted and coordinates wonderfully with the wallpaper), and a very loved Medieval-themed painting of angels that looks fantastic hanging on the new wallpaper (sorry, no photo).