Wallpaper – Poor Adhesion Issue Due to Dusty Walls

The existing wallpaper in this sink / vanity room of a hall bathroom is unique, because instead of coming in rolls, it came in pieces of torn paper, each about the size of a paper plate, that were placed on the wall in random ways, with the pieces overlapping each other.  This was a fairly popular wallpaper option back in the ‘90’s. 
I’m to hang new wallpaper in this room, so my first step was to remove the torn paper.  

This started out seeming easy, because the paper was literally falling away from the wall – but only around the top, and only the top 5” or so.  The lower areas were stuck nice and tight to the wall. What’s going on?

The original installer hung his wallpaper directly on new drywall / Sheetrock , with no primer and no other prep.  Turns out that, under this wallpaper, there are actually several different types of wall surfaces related to the new drywall.  

The main part of drywall is grey in color .  But here you see a band of white running along the top of the wall, under the ceiling, about 5” wide.   This is where the joint compound was applied , to smooth over joints , drywall tape , and nail heads . 

But the curious thing is that the wallpaper is adhering to the drywall – but not to this white band of joint compound below the ceiling line.
The reason?  After the drywall guys sanded this area smooth, no one wiped off the dust left over from sanding .  Thus, there was  a layer of dust on the wall, between the wall and the wallpaper.  Well, the wallpaper paste wants to bite into a solid surface, and it can’t get a grip on dust.  That’s why you see this top portion pulling away from the wall. 

I have a lot more prep to do in this room.  But before moving forward, I took a sponge and bucket of water and wiped the dust off that top portion of wall.  Now I’m assured that any smoothing compound or primer or wallcovering or other that is applied, will stick . 

For reference, here’s a shot of the un-primed drywall being uncovered as I strip off wallpaper in another area.  This picture shows the sections of drywall , joint compound , and also paint (from overspraying the woodwork ).  Wallpaper adheres to all these different surfaces in different ways.  Another reason to always use a wallpaper primer – it will adhere to just about any surface, and will create a uniform coating for the wallpaper to adhere to. 
I like Roman Pro 977 Ultra Prime.

Need a Little Reading Material in the Bathroom? ??

What fun wallpaper! This is very similar to grasscloth. But, instead of using natural grasses and reeds, this material is made of strips cut from magazine pages, rolled and folded into long narrow strips, and then sewed onto a paper backing. In some of the columns, you can actually read the words!

There is a similar product made from old newspapers – appropriately named “Yesterday’s News.”

I hung this in a powder room in a new, contemporary home in the Rice Military neighborhood of Houston. The homeowner, Cristin Wells, is an interior designer http://www.wellsdesignedhome.com/ who recently moved here from Chicago (not far from my hometown of St. Louis!), and brings her sophisticated playfulness here to the Bayou City.

This product is similar to grasscloth in that the seams are very visible. So I engineered the room to have seams fall evenly spaced on each wall, which we call balancing, and which gives a pleasing effect.

In addition, the material can be shaded, or paneled, which means there can be a noticeable color difference between strips, even if they come off the same bolt. In the third photo, you see how I have rolled the paper out on the floor, to check for shading / paneling, so the homeowner will be aware of this issue, and so I can plot how and where to use the various strips.

Indeed, before consulting with me, the homeowner initially purchased two bolts of paper; when I measured the space I told her that she needed five more. The additional bolts arrived in a different run. Run and batch and dye lot numbers are important – all bolts from the same run or batch were printed at the same time with the same batch of ink, and will generally be pretty much the same shade. Papers from a different run will be a slightly different shade, and will be very noticeable if placed next to one another on the same wall. This is true even with this recycled magazine page material – see the third photo – although instead of printing with ink, the ladies who manufacture this stuff (usually in China or somewhere in Asia) are grabbing handfuls of magazine pages. As you can see, color variations are still quite possible / probable.

In addition to the 10′ high ceilings, the room had a few features that made the install tricky. One was a deeper than usual vanity, which was difficult and somewhat dangerous to reach over to access the wall. This was also a “floating” vanity, which hung suspended on the wall with a short space underneath it that wanted to be covered with wallpaper. Contorting myself under a 30″ deep vanity into a 5″ high space to stick a couple of strips of paper to a rear wall that no one would ever see questioned my sense of reason – but I could not imagine leaving the wall unpapered, so I “got ‘er done!” Sorry, no photo.

Being a contemporary styled home, the window was recessed with a 1/2″ return,. This meant that I had to bring the paper to the edge of the window, and then wrap a mere 1/2″ around an outside corner. The paper was thick and didn’t want to make this turn, and, when it did, it didn’t want to stay stuck – it kept trying to lift up. Wetting the paper helped soften it so it was more agreeable to making these turns, and in some areas I also used a razor blade to make light horizontal slits in the material, right on the edge of the corner, to reduce tension and allow it to turn more easily. Sorry, no photo.

Speaking of making cuts … This stuff was thick and hard to cut, so it took a lot of pressure and several swipes to make many of the cuts, even with a brand new razor blade. When I trimmed the material horizontally at the ceiling and floor, the strings that held the folded magazine pages to the backing were cut also, and they came loose. That meant that there was nothing holding the folded magazine pages to the paper.

It turns out that each of those horizontal strips of folded magazine pages contained about 6 layers of paper, each folded accordion-style. Threads were sewn on to hold them to the backing. But once the threads were cut, the accordion-folded papers unfurled, spread apart, and pushed away from the backing. So when you looked at the ceiling or floor lines, you saw a puffy ridge running the width of the strip.

What I ended up doing was to go up to the ceiling and then down to the floor edges, gently pry apart the fanned layers, and use wallpaper paste to adhere them to one another. I had to get sufficient paste behind each of the six layers, for the entire 3′ width of each strip, press them back together, hold them until the adhesive tacked up – all without getting any paste on the paper or on the ceiling.

All of the above added a lot of time to this job, and I didn’t leave until 9:30 p.m. But the room looked great when I was finished. From its initial uninspired dull grey paint job to the colorful and quite unexpected recycled magazine pages covering the walls, this powder room has experienced a major transformation.

The wallpaper is by Seabrook, which has been purchased by York. Both are wonderful brands.