This couple in a nicely updated 1939 home in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston has a blank wall in the back of their large walk-in closet. They have a lot of colorful , modern art and wanted a backdrop for it that would be fun, but wouldn’t compete .One of the gals is an administrator for the athletic department in a local school district – so this small print “ Swimmers “ design is just perfect. In fact, the day I hung this, she was away at a swim meet in Austin ! Note that Spoonflower offers scores of designs under the “ Swimmers “ name, so be sure to check all of them, and all the colorways they come in, too. Detail Spoonflower is a little different from most wallpaper companies, in that it’s material comes in individual panels, or sheets – which they call rolls . Each of these is 24” wide, and then you choose the length you want, between 3’, 6’, 9’, and 12’. Each roll comes nicely packaged in an individual thick plastic zip-lock bag . These ones are upside down, so I had to re-roll them so the pattern would be coming off the top of the roll . Here are some tips about hanging Spoonflower. First of all, I like their “ Pre-Pasted Smooth Removable “ option. And it’s the only one I’ll work with. Their “ Traditional Pebble “ is a heavy vinyl that requires special trimming , bubbles, and is better suited for commercial spaces. And, the Peel & Stick – well, everyone ought to forget that sad stuff. Please read my link to the right about that material. In this photo, you can see that the white material is thin and translucent , allowing things underneath to show through, sort of like a shadow . So I need to be careful to make my pencil marks and notes on the wall very lightly. Side note: Never write on the wall or paper with ink or marker or crayon or grease pencil – it will bleed through the wallpaper . This is a pre-pasted material , meaning that a thin layer of paste is already applied to the back. To activate the paste , all you need to do is dip it in water , run it through a water tray , or spritz the back with a squirt bottle (uneven and kills your wrist) . Their paste is quite adequate. But I do like to have a little extra assurance, so I will roll on a little of my Roman 780 wallpaper paste onto the back. Then I take a sponge and drip clean water from a bucket onto the back of the paper . Next I use a paint roller to spread the mixture of water and paste around the back . This both activates the pre-paste, and also spreads around a little extra adhesive . Next, the paper gets folded pasted-side-to-pasted-side ( called booking ), then rolled or folded loosely. I like to dip the ends of the rolled strip into a bucket of water – just 1/8” or so, to prevent them from drying out while booking. Then the strip is placed in a plastic trash bag to prevent it from drying out during the booking period – a few minutes. I use this time to paste and book my next strip . Spoonflower Pre-Pasted Smooth is a little different from most papers, because it’s designed to be overlapped at the seams. Here I am lining up a seam. This overlap does show as a ½” wide ridge along the entire length of each strip. With busy patterns, it’s not very visible. Even with sparse designs like this one, once it’s dry and flat, you don’t notice. Here’s the overlapped seam looking toward the light, which is leaving a very minor shadow. And the overlap can be a good thing. For starters, most wallpapers shrink a little when the paste dries, so you can end up with slight gaps at the seams. Overlapping eliminates that. Also, if a wall is unstable underneath, due to incompatible layers of paint , or dusty walls, or other, the tension of these drying strips of paper can cause the layers inside the wall to come apart / delaminate – and that will result in paper that comes away from the wall, taking layers of paint and etc. along with them. This usually cannot be repaired or “ glued back down .” (Do a Search here to learn more) So overlapping the seams disperses the tension caused by the drying paper, and eliminates any seam from landing on the wall (because the sheets are overlapped ), so no popped seams .Here is the seam looking away from the light.Because Spoonflower Smooth Pre Pasted is thin paper and water-activated , it absorbs a lot of moisture from the water. So the material can’t help but expand . This can result in bubbles on the wall. Also, when air pockets develop, there is nowhere for the air to escape, so, again, bubbles and blisters. If there are huge bubbles, it may be worth taking a brush or plastic smoother and chasing them out. Or using a pin or razor blade to poke tiny holes to let the air out. But, really, if you can just relax and let nature take its course, as the paper dries, these bubbles will dry flat and disappear. Trust me. Another thing that can happen is wrinkles . These tend to form in the same place on every strip , and coordinate with how the paper was booked and rolled after pasting . The worst of these can be chased out with a plastic smoother. But there are dangers to over-using the smoother tools. Doing so can stretch the wallpaper and cause it to warp, which means the pattern might not match up perfectly on the next strip. Or it might cause wrinkles that can’t be brushed out. Again – if you can just sit tight and let the paper dry naturally, the creases and folds will disappear. I did some experimenting and found that booking and then rolling the strip up like a newspaper resulted in more wrinkles.It worked better to paste, book, and then fold gently and loosely. Then into the plastic bag to sit for a few minutes . Spoonflower PrePasted Removeable Smooth . I like this stuff. Removeable means that it’s designed to strip off the wall easily and with no/minimal damage to your wall when you redecorate down the road. I suspect this is made by York , as it’s very similar to their SureStrip line . Good stuff. The order comes with a mock-up of the strips / rolls you’ve purchased.Install instructionsPromo info from Spoonflower .
This happens not infrequently, and it’s puzzling to me. At the top of the wall, the pattern match drops down to the right.Yet at the center of the wall it matches perfectly.But get to the bottom of the wall and it drops again, but this time to the left.
Yes, some papers do stretch / expand when they get wet with paste. But that’s not the situation here, because this is A.) a non-woven material, which generally do not expand, and B.) every strip was treated the same way. In other words, if every strip is pasted, booked, and left to sit for the same length of time, ALL the strips should expand the same amount, right? And the pattern should match at the top, middle, and bottom. Right?
But even that argument doesn’t apply, because this, again, is a NW / non-expansion material, and, besides, I didn’t paste the wallpaper but pasted the wall instead. So the material had no chance to get wet or swollen with paste.
I believe this is a factory trimming issue. Somewhere along the line, the trimmers got off-track, or started trimming on the bias, just enough to throw off the pattern match.
In cases like this, the rule of thumb industry standard is to match the pattern as best as possible at eye level (middle of the wall) and let nature take its course, as they say, on the upper and lower sections.
Luckily this particular pattern only had one motif area that matched across the seams, and there were only three of those per the height of each strip. So the two slight mis-matches were both way above and below eye level, so not very noticeable.
This pattern is called Palm Leaves and is by Cole & Son . Other than this printing snafu, it’s a good quality wallpaper. See previous post
This kitchen in the Spring area of north Houston suffered severe water damage from burst pipes during the hard freeze in February 2021. Nearly a year later, they are almost finished with repairs, including new drywall on bottom of walls, new cabinets, new plumbing, cabinets, electrical, and more. Here you see the contractor’s repair work on top of some of the original wallpaper, which dates to the early 1980’s! It was a good brand, and the installer did a great job. For various reasons, I opted to leave this wallpaper in place, and so skimmed over uneven areas and then primed on top of it with Roman Pro 977 Ultra Prime. The homeowner’s new choice is very similar to the previous paper, but with a more springy feel and a lot of upward movement. The area below the chair rail will receive another coat of paint to better define the correct yellow color. Or, the homeowner may switch to a green pulled from the leaves in the pattern.This wall with the fir-down / soffit was a real bugger, for various reasons, and took me about four hours.Looks so sharp against the white paint and tile!The wallpaper was printed on a white substrate, so I ran black chalk along the edges of each strip, to try to prevent white from showing at the seams. Still, some of the strips shrank just a half a tad, and that did allow some white to show. This wallpaper is a non-woven material, which has a high polyester content, and is not supposed to stretch or shrink, so this is disappointing. Pasting the wall and dry-hanging the material would have probably helped. But the material was extremely thick and stiff, and plus the room had way too many turns and bends and angles, so pasting the paper made the most sense. These gaps are very minor, and only visible when viewed from straight on; from an angle you can’t even see them. On some papers, I can pull some tricks out of my bag and camouflage them. But with this non-woven material, don’t even try anything with paint, marker, chalk or anything else – it will surely stain the material. The walls are smooth. The slight texture you see is the non-woven material. When an edge is torn, you can actually see the polyester fibers – a lot like fiberglass. This material is very strong, and is designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece when it’s time to redecorate. Manufacturer is Mind The Gap out of Transylvania (!), and the design is called Aquafleur, in the Anthracite color. The material comes as a 3-panel set, which they call one “roll.” The overall width of the A, B, and C panels side-by-side is about 5′, and the height is just under 10′. The height of the wall was less than 5,’ and the strips were nearly 10′ long, so at least 5′ was lost of each strip. Because the pattern was a mural type, rather than a typical repeating wallpaper design, even more paper was lost in working around the configurations of the room – for instance, a full 10′ strip would be needed to paper just one 9″ high strip above the door. So there was an incredible amount of waste – and this is a higher-priced boutique brand. But the lady of the house really loves it, and so she went with her heart.
This is a recently-finished home in a brand new development out Hockley way – far northwest Houston. Like most new construction these days, everything started out white or vanilla.
But the homeowner – who is also an interior designer – likes things to feel both livelier and cozier. She has beautiful stained wooden furniture to warm things up, and she displays a number of treasured items and collectibles to add personality.
For the walls, she’s added color. Not hit-you-in-the-face brights, but comfortable colors like “Peanut Shell” paint on the great room walls, and this deep rust colored wallpaper in a paisley print in the adjoining open kitchen area.
The room looks much better in person than in these photos. And the wallpaper working its way around the white cabinets and pantry door was striking!
The wallpaper pattern is named Driskill and is by Thibaut, one of my favorite brands. Thibaut makes lots of types of paper, but this one has the feel that I call “satiny.” The paper is quite malleable, which was good because this room had wonky walls and rounded corners that can throw things out of plumb and out of square. It also resists shrinking, so even when I needed to twist or stretch it into position, it held tightly to the wall, so no worries about teeny gaps showing white at the seams.
The interior designer for this job is Leona Rossy Interiors.
Such a beautiful pattern really transformed this dining room in the Highland Village area of Houston.
The homeowner started out wanting the whole dining room papered, but the material (by Peter Fasano, called “Meadow”) is crazy expensive. So she toyed with the idea of papering just the fireplace wall. Then she decided to paper that fireplace wall, and also the mirror-image fireplace wall in the living room directly across the hallway.
But as we approached the install date, she decided that she wouldn’t be completely happy unless she had what she really wanted, which was her original vision for the room – all four walls.
Now she’s crazy happy. And her husband is happy, too – he likes the wallpapered look so much that he is ready to do another room. 🙂
From my point of view, this is one of the nicest papers I’ve ever worked with. It had to be hand-trimmed to remove the unprinted selvedge, and the trim marks were spot-on. The paper took the adhesive well, and it was easy to smooth into place. It would stretch when needed, and wrinkles of excess paper could be eliminated, which helped a lot when accommodating for unplumb walls. There was minimal shrinking as it dried. It is thin and hugs the wall tightly, and was easy to turn corners.
The design is a soft black line drawing on a slightly off-white pearlized background.
I know – the print is too small to read. But perhaps that is a good thing.
You see, the manufacturer of this wallpaper has provided instructions that don’t make sense.
In one paragraph, he tells the wallpaper installer to paste the paper, fold it (book), and let it sit for 10-15 minutes.
But in the next paragraph, he says it’s equally O.K. to paste the wall and then apply the dry wallpaper directly to the pasted wall.
Folks, that don’t make no sense!
If the wallpaper has been pasted and then set aside for a period of time, it will absorb the paste, soften, expand, etc., and that step generally prevents stretching or bubbling on the wall.
But dry-hang products are not supposed to stretch or expand or bubble, so you can put paste on the wall rather than on the back of the paper, and take the dry paper directly to the wall.
These instructions apply to two different products, and the pasting methods are specific to each specific material, and cannot be mixed.
Me thinks that this manufacturer (like many out there), is good at designing pretty patterns, but has no clue as to what makes a good wallpaper, and has even less of a clue as to how to hang it on a wall. Me thinks he has snooped around the websites and instruction sheets of other wallpaper manufacturers and then “borrowed” some of their terminology, and simply tossed it into his own instructions, hoping to cover all the bases.
I hang wallpaper every day (almost), and I have the experience to know how to paste and handle this particular product. But the poor DIY’er who buys this wallpaper and tries to hang it by following the instructions, will be confused, and may well end up with a mess on his wall – wrinkles, bubbles, poor adhesion, yada.
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