Calculating for wallpaper is not about square feet. Square feet works for paint, where you can use every bit of paint in the can to spread around the room. Not so for wallpaper. You also have to factor in the amount of waste. Waste has to do with trimming at ceiling and floor, trimming around windows and doors and vanities and etc. And with matching the pattern. This pattern has a 30” pattern repeat. That means, depending on the height of your wall, you can lose nearly 3’ just to match one strip to the next. In this photo, you can see 2’ length being cut off. All that gets tossed into the trash.This wallpaper is nearly 2’ wide. That 2’ wide x 2’ long lost to match each strip = nearly 4 square feet lost to the scrap pile – for each strip. Here’s a look at the scrap pile. Multiply that by 20 strips needed to get around the room. !Here’s more. All this is going in the trash. So, please, before purchasing your wallpaper, please let the installer measure and calculate how much you need. I prefer to / insist on measuring in person, but some of my colleagues will calculate from your measurements, drawings and photos. The pattern is called Frutto Proibito and is by Cole & Son .
I’m fixin’n to hang faux grasscloth on this accent / headboard wall in a master bedroom in the Spring Branch area of Houston. The textured wall has been skim-floated , sanded smooth , primed , and is ready for wallpaper . The material is 20.75″ (20 and 3/4″) wide . So here I’m measuring off how many strips of wallpaper I’ll need. I’ve counted out seven strips across the wall, and have come to my last (8th) strip. Look at my pencil mark – it’s at 21.” Remember that the paper is 20 3/4″ wide. This means that, to cover that last, scant 1/4″ width , I’ll have to use a ninth strip. Which will be a whole 9′ high strip that’s 20.75″ wide. Useing a 1/4″ wide strip off a 9′ long length leaves us with a whole lot of waste – paper / square footage just going into the trash. This is, again, why you should not purchase wallpaper based on square footage. It’s more a matter of determining how many strips you will need – factoring in the pattern repeat, etc. Even better , have the wallpaper installer make a site – visit and calculate for you. Going a step further … Since this is a (faux) grasscloth and has not pattern match , the seams will all be visible . So we try to balance the panels on the wall. Meaning, the wall will look better with panels of equal-widths, instead of, for instance, eight panels at 21″ wide and one at 1/2″. For the record, it also looks better to not have a seam fall at dead-center on the wall. Better to have that center panel straddle the mid-point. With this particular install, that’s what I chose to do. I took the first (let’s just call it 21″ wide for ease) … I took the first 21″ wide panel and used my laser level to line it up so 10 1/2″ fell on either side of the center line on the wall. So, this first panel was straddling the center line. From there, I used full-width (21″) panels one either side. Until I got to the last panel on the left, and the last one on the right. These two ended up each being about 15″ wide. So I had seven panels that were 21″ wide, and then two flanking on either side that were 15″ wide. This gave the wall a nice, balanced, uniform look. Yes, I could have hand-trimmed each strip to 19″ wide or whatever the math would have worked out to. But my option was simpler, faster, maintained uniformity between the majority of the panels, as well as uniform width on the two outer panels, eliminated the worry of gaps at the seams due to unevenly trimmed rigid vinyl goods, and the 6″ width difference wasn’t very noticeable. And, also, since this was a faux grasscloth and color variations were minimized, you could hardly see the seams, nor the width of the panels, anyway. From 5′ away, this wall looked perfectly homogeneous .
Window wall before. Due to the logistics of plotting and hanging grasscloth, this one wall took me six hours. More on that in a separate post.Finished wall with drapes replaced. The drapes compliment the slight sheen of the grasscloth material. How elegant ! Below the windows.Below the windows .Rounded bull-nosed edges on this entry arch . The edges are always tricky to wallpaper . Arch done. East corner. I stripe the wall with dark paint to prevent the white wall primer from showing in case of tiny gaps at the seams . The southwest corner had an odd angle in it, probably due to the powder room or stairs or maybe A/C ducts on the other side of the wall. The light hits that one angled wall differently. This photo also nicely shows the fine texture of the grass material, and the subtle sheen . Also note that the seams in grasscloth are always visible . So good installer will take care to plot so the panels are placed in the most pleasing manner – in this case, down the center of the wall to the left. This does eat up a little (or a lot) of extra paper – the rolled up scraps you see are leftovers from this process. They can’t be used anywhere else, so will be thrown away . Planning all this is another reason to have the installer figure how many rolls / bolts are needed. Purchasing based on square footage would result in an unbalanced panel layout . Northwest corner. Grasscloth often has shading or paneling ( color differences ) between strips. This particular grasscloth was amazingly homogeneous in color, and I was very pleased. In fact, over this entry to the home office was the only place where there was any noticeable color difference at all. (also visible in previous photo) Unfortunately, I don’t know the brand . But I suspect that a lot of grasscloth and other such natural materials are made by the same manufacturer – just sold under different brand names . The home is in the West University area of central Houston .
Photo: Waste from one 2-wall room; all this paper is going into the trash.
For all those folk who think they can figure up how much wallpaper they need without first consulting a professional installer, and they try to calculate based on square footage, along with “calculators” found on vendor websites … Here is a good example of why square footage is NOT an accurate calculator.
Referencing yesterday’s post …. I’m not going to get into a whole lot of math re square footage. Let’s focus on the Strip Count method. Let’s just say that this accent wall required 12.3 strips. Effectively, that is 13 strips.
Due to the 11′ height of the wall and due to the length of the pattern repeat, each 33′ long double roll bolt yielded two strips.
After I used those two strips, I was left with a “tail end” that was about 8′ long. Since my wall height was 11′, here was nothing I could do with a strip 8′ long. So it went to the scrap pile.
The paper was about 2′ wide. 2′ wide x 8′ long = about 16 square feet of waste. Multiply that times the 13 strips it took to cross the wall, and you get 208 square feet of paper that is going right into the trash bin.
That’s roughly equivalent to FOUR DOUBLE ROLL BOLTS of wallpaper. Bought and paid for, but not available to put on your wall.
In real life, measuring is even more complicated than that.
In addition, the photo above shows the waste from today’s install of a 14 single roll breakfast room. The large roll lying on the floor, and the roll behind it, are tightly wound up and are both WAY bigger than the photo makes them appear… A whole lot of paper cut off and thrown away, in order to match the pattern.
So, folks, please let the professional measure, before you order your wallpaper. There are many, many factors to be considered, aside from raw square footage.
To come up with how much to buy, lot of people carefully measure and calculate the square footage of their room, and then divide that by the square footage on a bolt of wallpaper. WRONG!
This does not allow for the “waste factor.”
Wallpaper is not like paint. You can’t grind it up and put it in a bucket and spread every square inch onto your walls. You will lose some – often a lot – to waste.
In the photo above, I have only papered 1/4 of the room. Yet look at my discard pile – all this paper was cut off in order to match the pattern, or to go around a window or door, etc.
By the end of the day, this pile was a whole lot larger.
If you are trying to calculate how much wallpaper to purchase, please click the link to the page on the right “How To Measure For Wallpaper” for more details.
This wallpaper pattern by Justina Blackeney has a really long pattern repeat – 45″. That means that any given design motif appears only about every four feet!
See photo, where I have rolled the paper out on my table.
Depending on the height of your walls, matching the pattern could result in a tremendous amount of waste. Indeed, I was cutting off and throwing away about 2′ of paper for every strip I put on the wall.
That’s why a strip count is a more accurate way to measure for how many rolls of paper you need, instead of going strictly by square footage.
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