Battling a Rain Shower Head – Wet My Pants!

Gotta hang wallpaper above the shower tiles in this cramped space in an under the stairs powder room .  Between priming , measuring , hanging , yada, I had to make many trips in and out of that space. The sloped ceiling and confined area of the shower stall are difficult enough to work around.  But factor in the rain style shower head , and it got more tenuous.

But I was able to squeeze myself, my ladder , my tools , and the wallpaper strips , around, over, and under that monstrous thing.

Besides all that physical contorting, another issue  was … as I was climbing down off my ladder , my clothing got entangled in the wall-mounted faucet – and turned the water on! 

Yes, I got a dousing!  And the shower floor got wet , so my socks and feet got soaked , too! 

Not that bad, though.  And, to be honest, it was kinda funny.

This is a newish home in the Houston Heights .  Coincidentally enough, I’ve hung a good number of powder rooms with this same lay out layout .    Turns out the builder is well-known in the Heights, and uses this same floor plan models in many new build s. 

I just hope that next time, the homeowner chooses a wall-mounted showerhead! 

Picasso Slept Here – Crazy Pattern in a Complicated Powder Room

This is a fairly large powder room with a sloped ceiling, as it is situated under the stairs. You can see a bit of the ceiling at the top of the photo. The room also had this odd recessed niche with “columns” on either side, and a door leading to a closet.
In addition, there were tons of the rounded / bull-nosed edges that have been common in new homes in the last 10 years or so. These are tricky to wrap wallpaper around, and equally difficult to trim wallpaper to the edge.

Here is the niche area done, with wallpaper wrapped around the columns, and cut neatly along the horizontal bull nosed edge above the entry.
Wrapping the wallpaper around this edge and onto the ceiling of the niche would have made the area way too busy and claustrophobic. Because these edges are never perfectly straight and level, it’s also quite likely that the wallpaper will go crooked, and you’ll end up with gaps or overlaps at the seams.
A better option is to paint that ceiling area. I suggested the murky green color that’s in the leaves on the wallpaper pattern.

Here’s the east wall of the room. The vanity and sink are at the bottom right.

Here it is finished. In this case, the fir-down underside was only about a foot deep, so less chance of the wallpaper going crooked, so I did wrap it around the rounded edge and underneath. Still, one of the wallpaper strips did twist askew, and there was a small gap at one seam. With this pattern, no biggie – I just cut out a leaf and pasted it over the gap.

I told you the room had crazy angles!

Note that in papering angled areas like this, you can match the pattern in some places, but there will be mis-matches in others, such as where the sloped ceiling meets the fir-down. This wild pattern is perfect for disguising any mis-matches!

Rolling the paper out on the floor, to get an idea of the pattern’s layout .

Closer look at the lemons and leaves . And angles .
It looks like a Picasso painting, don’t you think? The homeowner wanted something wild and fun , to set off the white minimalism in the rest of the home .

The pattern is called Citrus and is by A Street Prints . It’s a nice non-woven material , doesn’t expand , and can be hung by the paste the wall method , although I opted to paste the paper , as I usually do.
Non-wovens are designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece, with no / minimal damage to the wall when you redecorate . They’re usually a pleasure to install . They’re more stain resistant and more able to withstand humidity than many traditional wallpapers .

The home of this busy young family is in the West University area of Houston .

Horizontal Cut To Ease Installation in Tight Spot

This is an under-the-stairs cloffice ( closet turned home office ). Wallpaper needs to go along the wall on the right. Over the top of the shelf alcove on the right, over the top of the shelf on the left, down the center, into the niche above the desk area on the left, and then down and under into the knee / kick area under the desk on the left.
Easily accomplished with paint. But tricky with wallpaper – which can twist, crease, tear, buckle, etc. Not to mention paste getting slopped onto all that nice newly-painted woodwork.

The part above the desk is not so horribly tricky, but this portion under the desk is, mostly due to the narrow transition point.

Another issue is that the strip of wallpaper is set to extend to the right about 5″ over the shelf alcove. This means that paste will be getting onto the woodwork, as well as adding weight and stress to the whole strip.
Since the wallpaper comes in a rectangular strip, a whole lot of the top section is going to overlap onto that sloped ceiling area, getting paste on that, too.

To make all that easier and cleaner, here I have roughed in some cuts, measuring and templating ahead of time, to reduce the amount of paper that will overlap onto the shelf woodwork and the ceiling.
Once this strip is pasted, I’ll use my blue plastic tape on the pasted side of the paper, to keep paste from getting on to the navy blue paint. No photo of that, but you can Search on ” blue tape ” to see previous posts about that cool stuff.

As mentioned above, it was going to be really difficult to manipulate the wallpaper down the wall and then down and under the desk area without damaging the paper.
So I decided to eliminate stress on the paper by cutting the strip into two sections – one for above the desk and one for under it. I used my straightedge and a razor blade and cut along a horizontal element of the design.

Here I have the top section in place. No need to wrestle a 24″ wide strip down that narrow area and then down and underneath the desk.

Here I’m about to position the bottom piece.

Here it is in place.

All finished! No stress on the paper, no creases or tears. And no swearing during the installation!
This wallpaper pattern is called Florida Toile and is by Katie Kime in their very popular Cities Toile collection .

Something’s Bugging Me …

Powder room before.

Powder room after the introduction of various bugs, insects, critters and creepy crawlers.

The homeowner loves bugs. She likes this view so much that she said she might not cover it with a mirror. Who needs a mirror in a powder room, anyway?

This powder room is under the stairs, hence the sloped ceiling. The wallpaper has the look of botanical identification prints, in a dreamy shade of blue.

Mind the Gap is the manufacturer, and the pattern is called Entomology. The material comes as a 3- roll / strip set. It’s a non-woven product, so you can hang it by pasting the wall. Although I usually choose to paste the paper. Interestingly, this paper was lot thinner and crisper than the black Aquafleur by the same brand I hung a couple of weeks ago. In fact, it was quite translucent. I had to not make pencil marks on the walls nor on the back of the paper, for fear they would show through the front.
This stuff is also very curly – meaning that it wants to stay tightly rolled up. Two days before the install, I asked the homeowner to roll the material backward and secure with an elastic hairband, to relax the curl. This worked wonderfully, and I had nice flat sheets to work with.
The pattern is essentially a mural, spread across three strips that connect to the next set of three strips. The pattern does not repeat. That means that it takes one full ” roll” for each strip. Since the rolls are 10′ long and the walls in this bathroom were less than 8′, there was more than 2′ of paper cut off and thrown away, for each of 15 strips around the room.
The two 8″ high strips over the door would also have each used up a full 10′ roll. But I did a little measuring and plotting and trimming and used scraps for this area. This also enabled me to put bugs that had not been seen on any of the other strips up over the door. Because this space was only 8″ high, I had to find insects that were small – didn’t want anyone to get his legs or antenna cut off! Sorry, I forgot to get a photo of that area.
This room had some tricky spaces. Besides the sloped ceiling, which presented challenges of its own too complicated to delve into here, the 2″ gap you see next to the vanity in the top photo … the wide strip on the wall with the hand towel ring, plus the 2″ wide strip between the vanity and that wall probably took me a full 40 minutes to get in place.
The townhome is in the Galleria / Highland Village neighborhood of Houston.

Bold David Hicks Geometric in Garden Oaks Powder Room

This young family wanted some WOW! Factor for their new home’s plain-Jane powder room. It’s a 2-room set up, with the sink in one area and the toity around the corner in a more private area.

Looking through one room into the next – yes, really a WOW! Factor!

Looks fantastic with the burnished gold faucets, light sconces, and hand towel ring.

Opposite wall. I centered the pattern on the wall opposite the mirror, so that the design would work around the room evenly and the pattern would fall equally on these two walls. In other words, the pattern hits the tile wall on the left at exactly the same point as it does on the tile wall to the right. The sconces also land on the same element in the wallpaper. This gives a very symmetrical look as you face the mirror. One of those things no one can put his finger on, but it makes the whole room feel balanced and in sync.

Back wall connecting to right wall with door that leads to the entry hall.

The commode room is under the stairway, so has a strongly sloped ceiling – and tight working quarters. You can also see that the wall is bowed in the corner, resulting in a good pattern match at top and bottom, but some mis-alignment in the center. Pretty typical. No walls are perfectly plumb, no ceiling is perfectly level, and corners are just about always a bit wonky. Geometric designs like this are particularly difficult to make look perfect.

On close-up, you can see a slight raised ink texture. This surface printed wallpaper was not a crisp look – nothing wrong with that … it’s part of the hand-crafted look. The non-woven material is thick and stiff, and the seams were a bit more noticeable than on many other non-wovens. I also noted that where the gold ink hit the edges of the paper, there were ever-so-slight curls and overlaps. My guess is the gold ink reacted to the wet paste and expanded differently from the black and the background color. Never mind. From two feet away, you can’t notice it at all.

The David Hicks Collection by GP & J Baker contains several variations of this type of bold geometric pattern. Some of the vendors are calling this a “new” release … but I first hung one of these designs maybe 10 years ago.

Unfortunately, they haven’t gotten any better with the quality. Surprising, because GP&J Baker’s papers are usually very nice – I did one just a few months ago and loved it. Conversely, this one is quite stiff, and trying to work it into tight spots such as corners or behind a toilet or around a vanity or light fixture can result in creases. And the ink flakes off very easily. Here, just pressing the wallpaper against the baseboard so it could be trimmed caused the ink to chip off, and you can see little bits of it collected on top of the baseboard on the left. Luckily, this was at the floor and not very noticeable. I used some black chalk to cover the white areas. But at eye-level, this would have necessitated removing the whole strip and replacing with a new one.

Wallpaper installer Houston

Timorous Beasties Ruskin Floral – A Trying Pattern Match

Timorous Beasties makes some unusual wallpapers, with most of them including animals or insects in the design. It’s cool stuff!

This particular pattern, called Ruskin Floral, was more than a bit of a challenge to plot and hang. The manufacturer said there was no pattern match, but just a subtle impression in the textured background that could be matched if you wanted to, but was not necessary. They also said that this pattern match came at something like every 56″. And that it was a quarter-drop match (pattern motif repeats at the same height in the strip every fourth strip).

All of this info was wrong. It turned out that the tree branches in the design did match across the seams. And the pattern repeat was more like 36″, instead of 56″. And, yes, you could have matched the design as a quarter-drop – but it looked better as a traditional half-drop (repeats every other strip).

But what was most unexpected was that the design had these areas of darker foliage that appeared mid-way through the bolt. In every photo that I saw on the manufacturer’s website or on-line, only the picture of the sparse tree branches was pictured (what you see at the top of the wall in the top photo). Even though I rolled out several feet of each bolt on the floor, I had no idea that there was this other area of colorful and full foliage and insects, which you see at the bottom of the wall in the top photo.

I plotted and got my first strip in the center of the wall, and then pinned the second strip next to it. Once I stood back, I was able to see that the foliage got darker and fuller as it dropped closer to the floor. I had not anticipated that.

With 13′ high walls and 13′ long strips, and 33′ on each bolt of paper, there were 20′ more feet (one more strip) left on each of those two first bolts.

But when I pulled more paper from the bolt and pinned it temporarily to the wall, matching the background tree branch motifs, this new strip, which had started from the middle of the first bolt (the first 1/3 of the bolt was now on the wall), was full of colorful foliage – which did not meld well with the sparser tree branch area on the first two strips that were now on the wall.

If I hung this new strip next to the two existing strips in the center of the wall, I would have had two sparse tree branch areas in the center, and then a stripe of darker, fuller foliage directly horizontal to it.

At first, I was going to go this route, because it made the best use of the number of rolls we had (two strips from each double roll). I planned to put two strips of darker foliage next to the two strips of lighter tree branches.

I also contemplated taking off the two center strips (the ones with lightly leafed foliage) and replacing them with ones that had more color and fullness. But I realized that if all the pictures I had seen of this pattern showed the sparse areas, then that’s what the homeowner had seen, too, and she probably was not expecting to see the very dark and full and busy heavily-patterned area, especially not at the top center of her accent wall.

Even more compelling – we didn’t have enough paper for me to rip off and discard two 13′ high strips.

I spent about an hour and a half contemplating various possible options.

Just then, the interior designer walked in – and she was just in time. Two sets of eyes are better than one. By then, I had a number of strips pinned to the wall, to see how the pattern could be played out. She didn’t like my idea of hanging two sparse strips, flanked by two heavily pattered strips – she thought it looked top-heavy, especially over the windows.

We fiddled some more, knocked around various options, and finally concluded that, even though the bed would be obscuring much of the fuller pattern, the wall looked better with the sparse area up high, and the fuller floral area near the floor.

I studied the 33′ long bolt I had rolled out on the floor, with the lighter area at the top, the fuller area in the center, and then tapering off to a lighter area toward the end of the bolt. Our decision meant that I could get only one strip of paper out of each double roll bolt.

The problem with that was that I needed 10 strips, but only had 8 bolts. We’ll come back to that in a minute.

The next issue was that quarter-drop pattern repeat. And that sloped ceiling, which also effected the way the pattern hit the wall. If I used the paper the most economically, and matched the first tree branches as they came off the roll, then that quarter-drop pattern match would have started marching diagonally up and across the wall, and then dropped down again, 7′ to the right. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s a look that would play out better on a larger space, such as a full dining room, not one accent wall in a bedroom.

(Quarter-drop pattern matches are very hard to get one’s head around, and way more than I can get into here, but suffice it to say – they lead to a lot of head scratching and a whole lot of wasted paper.)

After more fiddling, I realized that the pattern was printed on each bolt exactly the same; in other words, the design was more like a mural. With one strip per bolt, the design was played out across alternating “A” and “B” bolts. If I ignored the sloping ceiling and cut each strip to the full height of 13,’ I could ensure that specific flowers in the darker area near the floor would hit the wall at the same height, lending a homogenous and pleasing rhythm to the pattern.

Problem solved!

But now we get back to the wall that needs 10 strips, but we only have 8 bolts of paper (one strip per bolt).

In the top photo, all the paper has been hung except that last strip to the left of the window. (There is a mirror image on the right side of the wall.) That area was about 9′ high. Since I had already taken approximately 13′ off each 33′ long bolt, I had about 20′ still left. But since that started in the center of the bolt, it was an area full of the heavier colored and printed pattern. Even though the pattern of the tree branches would match, I didn’t want to place that darker strip next to the lighter strips already on the wall. It might have looked interesting, as a sort of darker “frame” for the outer edges of the wall – but, like the interior designer, I thought it would look too dark and heavy and lopsided.

I remembered that the pattern thinned out again as it moved toward the bottom of the bolt. So I unrolled the paper down to the bottom, and then, working from the bottom instead of the top, I found the pattern match that corresponded to what was on the wall, and cut it to fit the height of the wall.

Trimmed and put in place, it looked pretty darned good. This piece (and it’s twin on the opposite side of the wall) didn’t have nearly as much dark foliage at the bottom as the other strips. At first I was going to cut some flowers out of scrap paper and appliqué them to fill in the void areas. But I realized that was getting kinda obsessive over something that few people would even notice.

It was just a 12″ wide strip, and there will most likely be furniture in front of it, and we were able to get by without having to buy two extra double rolls (which would have been different runs (see previous posts).

Getting this wall with a tricky pattern match to look good was a mix of luck, skill, mathematics, and having purchased enough paper. Always buy more paper than you think you will need.

The interior designer is Stacie Cokinos of Cokinos Design, and the home is in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston.

Trellis Pattern End Point Over A Door

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When hanging wallpaper in a room with four corners, that last corner virtually always ends in a mis-match. That’s because the width of the paper is not perfectly proportional to the width of the walls. With a wild pattern, you might not notice. But with a design like this trellis, your eye might be jarred by this mis-match.

So we try to hide this last corner, behind a door, hopefully, if it sits close to a the adjoining wall. But this powder room didn’t have any “hidden” corners, so the mis-match was going to be pretty noticeable. But I found a good place to hide it.

This room sits under the stairs, and has a sloping ceiling. Over the door, the wall was 20″ high, but where the ceiling sloped down near one corner of the door, it came to more like 10.” You’ll notice 10″ worth of mis-match much less than 20,” so I decided to put it right there. Normally, I wouldn’t put the kill point, as it’s called, in an open wall space right over a door, but in this room, and with this pattern, it was the best option.

I plotted which lines from the strip of wallpaper over the door would look best placed against the lines on the strip to the right of the door. I carefully cut along the design, making sure that the white lines met up with each other without any abrupt stops or angles.

Once finished, if you were just casually looking around the room, you would never notice that the pattern doesn’t match perfectly over that corner.

This trellis pattern is by Ronald Redding, for York Wallcoverings, and was bought at a discounted price from Dorota Hartwig at Southwestern Paint on Bissonnet near Kirby. (713) 520-6262 or dorotasouthwestern@hotmail.com. Discuss your project and make an appointment before heading over to see her.

Which Do You Prefer … ??

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Which do you prefer – paint on the ceiling, or wallpaper on the ceiling?

Me, I’m not a fan of wallpaper on ceilings, especially when it’s dark, or busy, or in an enclosed space. I think it makes the ceiling feel low and closed-in. Yet, all those adjectives apply to this powder room, and once the paper went up, I have to admit, it looks pretty darned good!

This particular room has a sloped ceiling, due to its location under the stairs in this new home in the Museum District of Houston. With sloped ceilings, it’s 50-50 … Do you paper the slope or not? Is the slope part of the wall, or part of the ceiling? It’s a judgment call.

This wallpaper pattern is called “Shantung Silhouette,” by Schumacher, and was bought at a discounted price from Dorota Hartwig at Southwestern Paint on Bissonnet near Kirby. (713) 520-6262 or dorotasouthwestern@hotmail.com. Discuss your project and make an appointment before heading over to see her.