Five Room Update – Kitchen Re-Do

Can you say ’80’s?! Dated and soiled, it really was time for this 30+ year old original paper to go.

Poor colors in this photo – the new paper is actually aqua and green a a bit of grey. One pattern was used for the walls, and another for the fir down / soffits.

A little better view of the true colors.

There is a pearlized or iridescent quality to this wallpaper.

Candice Olson’s line by York. Anything she touches, you can bet it will have a bit of shimmer and glimmer and glam.

Curlicues, caterpillars, or corn curls – this is a fun and active design, used just on the fir downs over the cabinets.

The Easy-Walls line in the Chesapeake collection by Brewster is a very nice pre-pasted paper, easy to install and easy to remove. It’s a very thin non-woven material, similar to another of my favorites, the Sure-Strip by York.

This shot, taken through the adjoining dining room, shows how beautifully the colors and patterns coordinate. Oh, and did I mention the beautiful new blue and green glass tile backsplash?!

The two-sister duo who selected patterns and colors for this League City (Houston) home did a superb job coordinating the two bedrooms, one bathroom, and the dining room and kitchen. The whole house has a very pulled together look, with a theme of gardens, light, fresh, and uplifting.

Disguising a Mis-Match Under a Fur-Down (Soffit)

Overhanging fur-downs, or soffits, can cause a conundrum when two of them meet in a corner. In this case, the fur-down was particularly deep (almost 2′), and difficult to reach. The wallpaper pattern coming along on the face (vertical surface) from the right has to match the pattern on to the left. But this means that, as the paper is folded under the fur-down, the pattern goes off in two different directions, and will not match where the two strips meet.

Sometimes this is handled by splicing the two pieces together, drawing a line from one corner to the other. This is neat and flat, but it leaves a very obvious mis-match, and the double-cutting (splicing) required can weaken the wall surface underneath, opening the potential for the wall to break open and the paper to curl.

So, in today’s case, I did something different. I overlapped the pieces of wallpaper a little. There is a visible ridge, but it’s way up high in a somewhat hidden location, and, when the paper is dry, everything pulls flatter and less noticeable. But you can see the mis-matched pattern.

To minimize this, I took some scrap wallpaper and carefully cut out part of the trellis pattern. I lined it up with the trellis pattern on the underside of the fur-down, and – voilà! The pattern mis-match still exists, but, because the lines of the pattern are intact, the eye tends to skip right over it.

As the paper dries, the ridge will become less noticeable, and the top layer of wallpaper will become more opaque, hiding the shadow of the pattern underneath.