It’s nice when a manufacturer does this. Notice that all of the pattern motifs are contained within the width / borders of this strip of wallpaper. Nothing passes across the seam. There is nothing to match from strip to strip. Even if the walls are out of plumb , or the ceiling is not level , this allows me to keep the same design element at the same spot below the ceiling, all the way across the wall or around the room . See photo. All seven strips across this nursery accent wall have the design motifs at the same distance below the crown molding. Not having to connect a pattern motif to another across each seam means that I can pull each strip up to where I want it under the crown molding. No going off-track or sloping / tracking down or up. This cute pattern of pastel hot air balloons is by Caitlin Wilson and is in the Sure Strip line of pre-pasted , easy to install and easy to remove wallpaper s made by York . I like this material a lot.
Accent wall before, textured wall has been smoothed , primed , and is ready for wallpaper . Hot air balloons , pastel colors , works for boy or girl , and will grow with the child as he/she ages . Here is the bold white child’s headboard that will be placed against the wall . Coordinates beautifully with the other three walls , which are painted a dusky pink . The wallpaper is by Caitlin Wilson , and is made by York . It’s in the Sure Strip line, which is a thin , pre-pasted material that is water-activated and easy to hang / install . It’s also designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece when you redecorate . I like this stuff a lot. The home is in the West U area of Houston .
Before. The homeowner wanted something much more fun than drab grey walls . Plus she need something that would coordinate with the brown tones in the vanity countertop.Here’s the solution! The paper is actually muddier and murkier than these photos show it to be, so it melds nicely with the brown stone .Here’s a better idea of what the true colors actually look like. Close-up.aManufacturer is York. This was purchased from Dorota at the Sherwin-Williams in the Rice Village of Houston , for a price below retail . Call before heading over to see her selection . (713) 59-6515 The Sure Strip line by York is a thin and pliable , water-activated , pre-pasted wallpaper that is DIY -friendly. It goes up nicely, and is designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece – and with no damage to the wall – when it’s time to redecorate . I like this product a lot. Although York has been prone to lots of printing defects (including today) in recent years. The home is in the Heights neighborhood of Houston .
Before. Grey and boring . The built-in banquette seating has been removed.Finished.Closer look.Showing the pattern centered on the wall, and with the shutters. The dimensions of the paper not corresponding well with the width of the window, along with logistics of pattern placement at the ceiling line but starting my first strip under the window all created some plotting and engineering challenges. Fun, but time consuming. But it turned out great!The original idea was to just paper the nook area, ending at the vertical door molding. But it would have looked odd to stop the wallpaper above this doorway. So the homeowner and I decided to run the paper along the top of the doorway, and then down the left side (not shown), which dead-ends into some cabinets and the granite countertop. It looked good and was the right call.It tickles me that this is quite obviously a riff on the very popular Strawberry Thief wallpaper pattern by William Morris , which is quite popular right now (do a Search here to see my installations of it). When a company comes up with a hit, you can be assured that a competitor will soon be making its own version of it. The original has a lot more color, but this version is limited to just two colors. Even though there is a lot of contrast between the black and the white , the pattern doesn’t feel busy, because the design is so close and tight . There is a lot of symmetry , repetitiveness , and balance in Wm Morris and similar styles . I love the raised ink texture to this material . Whoops! A slight pattern mis-match . The overall design is busy enough that small imperfections like this (as well as some color variations / shading ) are not really noticeable . It’s odd to me that the printing defects are different in different strips / rolls of the wallpaper . You’d think that if the print roller was out of whack, it would create the same image every time it strikes the wallpaper surface. Or maybe it’s the trimmers that are off. If they had cut 1/16″ more off that left edge, we might have a perfect pattern match . The manufacturer is York , one of my favorites , in their Sure Strip line, also one of my favorites. It’s in the Magnolia Home collection , by, yes, Joanna Gaines , of HGTV fame with the show Fixer Upper . SureStrip is a pre-pasted , thin , flexible , non-woven material that is easy to hang . It’s also easy to remove when you’re ready to redecorate , because it’s designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece with no damage to your walls . installer houston birds
This is a custom new-build ( Vintage Bayou City Homes ) in the Houston Heights, and the walls are smooth , so all they needed was my primer.The mural fills the wall with color and fun,,,,,, and lots of critters!It has a hand-painted watercolor look. Simply called Jungle Wallpaper Mural , it’s by Lulu & Georgia , and is made by York , in their Sure Strip line. Sure Strip is a pre-pasted product that is designed to strip off the wall easily when you redecorate. I love this stuff! It goes up like a dream, and will hold up for eons until you’re ready to redecorate. This mural comes in four panels, and the overall size is 6′ wide x 9′ high.
Let’s do some engineering so we can get this mural on the wall. The wall is a few inches less than 12′ wide, and 9′ high. The mural comes as a set of four panels, and the total width of the mural is 6′ wide x 9′ high. Therefore we need two 4-panel sets to span this wall. Here is the first set of four panels, pasted and hung. A really tricky thing with murals is that the strips / panels you place next to your first set need to match up with the existing pattern. Meaning, the panels need to be able to be hung consecutively next to each other and have the pattern continue uninterrupted. Not all murals are designed to continue from one to the next. Some will only fit a wall of certain dimensions. Still others are custom made to fit specific sizes … but that’s a topic for another blog post.You’re looking at two sets of mock-ups of the mural, side-by-side. The dotted lines show each individual panel. Toward the center, you see where Panel 4 of the mural on the right meets up with Panel 1 of the mural placed on the right. You can see that the trees and other elements from the mural on the left match up with the motifs on the mural to the right. This is good! It means that we can place murals next to each other to cover a wider wall space. Here is the finished wall with two murals placed next to each other, with the trees and animals continuing from one mural to the next. Second issue: The wall height between crown molding and baseboard was exactly 9′ high. The mural came exactly 9′ high. This might sound perfect – but it ain’t agonna work. The wallpaper / mural needs to be a few inches (preferably 3″-4″) taller than the wall itself. (Same goes for width) This little bit of wiggle room allows you to trim at the top and bottom of the wall. And it allows for walls that are not perfectly plumb and floors and ceilings that are not perfectly level. In this case, it wasn’t going to be possible to get the mural to fit inside that 9′ high space across a 12′ wide wall without going off-track a bit. We needed about 2″ of extra height at BOTH top and bottom. Well, you can’t make the wallpaper mural any taller, so we opted to make the wall shorter. The builder added an extra tall baseboard along the bottom of just this one wall. This reduced the wall height by about 3″, which gave us just enough extra paper length to split between the ceiling and baseboard. A little will be trimmed off at the ceiling line, and a little off the bottom / baseboard.If you look at the picture of the finished wall, the 4th photo, you’ll see that there are more “important” design elements at the bottom of the mural than at the top. The manufacturer does this on purpose, because they know that some of the mural will need to be cut off, in order to accommodate different wall heights, and for trimming at the ceiling and baseboard. Nearly a foot can be trimmed off the top of this mural without losing anything like an animal or a tree top. The same is not true about the bottom, though. As you can see in this photo, the designer has let elements run all the way down to the bottom of the mural … leaves, plant stems, and, as in the photo above, a bird’s feet. I tried to raise the strips up as high as possible, to avoid cutting off his feet. But I had to leave enough to accommodate trimming and wonky walls. So, as you see in the photo, the poor guy got his feet cut off. Still, all this is happening at the bottom of the wall, and no one is really paying attention to this area. Plus, there will be furniture in front. Still, all worth noting. Jungle Wallpaper Mural is by Lulu and Georgia and is in the Sure Strip line made by York . Some take-aways from this post that I hope you will keep in mind … ~Never order a mural to the exact dimensions of the wall. Add 4″ to height & width ~Consult with the paperhanger before ordering any material ~Rather than a mural that comes in one set size as this one does, consider a custom-sized mural that can be made to fit your specific wall. I like rebelwalls.com among others.
Sink / window area, primed and ready for wallpaper. Pattern nicely centered on this wall and at ceiling line.Breakfast area window wall before.I tweaked the pattern just a tad so I could get the dark vertical line along the cabinets on the right, and then also down the left side where this wall meets the painted wall. It makes a nice stopping point for the eye, and it looks so much better than box motifs that might have been chopped in half.The “star” design adds so much energy and life to this room!The pattern is in the Sure Strip line of pre-pasted wallpapers by York Wallcoverings. I really like Sure Strip. Graham & Brown makes a very similar design called Indigo, which is very popular. I like this one better, for lotsa reasons. The home is in Pearland, a southern suburb of Houston. Some previous posts show other rooms I did at that same time. The homeowners did a wonderful job of coordinating the colors and themes throughout the home, working with golds and greys. The wallpaper and design help came from Ballard Designs new physical store on W. Gray in Montrose / River Oaks. After I arrived to start work, the homeowner decided she wanted the paper behind the refrigerator and also over a bank of cabinets to the right over the ovens. I hadn’t measured for these areas, so we didn’t have enough paper. Ballard could order more, but it would take several weeks to arrive. So I had the homeowner contact my favorite resource, Dorota Hartwig at Sherwin-Williams on University in the Rice Village. (713) 529-6515. She’s been slingin’ paper for decades, and knew right where to go that could supply the same paper in just a few days. The additional two bolts arrived yesterday, so I was able to hang them and finish the job today, right on schedule. 🙂 This home suffered extensive water damage to the entire first floor due to burst pipes after the major freeze here in Houston in February 2021. It’s taken these folks more than a year to get their home back together. I was proud to help them get their home and lives back to normal – and a good bit prettier!
Mural panels standing on edge are cut, sequenced, staged, and ready to be pasted. The panel lying on the floor will be my last strip, and will need to be measured and trimmed narrower before it’s ready to be pasted or hung. I use several different methods to paste pre-pasted wallpaper, and you can do a Search here to read more. But for today, I’m using the tried-and-true historic method of running the strip quickly through a water tray . At the top of the photo, several strips have already been submerged and pulled through the water, then folded pasted-side-to-pasted-side. This is called booking . Booking allows the adhesive on the back of the wallpaper to absorb the water and become activated. And it allows the wallpaper substrate to absorb moisture, expand, and then contract a little. This method can sometimes get the material a little too wet, which can lead to over-expansion and then bubbles on the wall. That’s why I’ve placed the booked strips at a slant and over the bucket – so excess water can drain off. Usually I paste and book one strip and then paste and book the next strip. While I’m hanging one, the second one is booking and waiting its turn to be hung. But with this water tray method and certain brands of pre-pasted material, such as Anewall , York , or Sure Strip , the paper sometimes gets so wet that it needs more time to dry before attempting to hang. So I’m pasting more strips at a time, so they can be drying out a bit while I hang the first strips. There’s a bit of a risk to this, which is the potential for the paper to over-expand as it sits wet waiting to be hung. Then once it’s on the wall and starts to dry, it can shrink. All wallpaper shrinks when it dries. But if it has expanded too much, then when it dries and shrinks, you can be left with small gaps at the seams. Again, gaps are common with all wallpapers (most all), but can be exaggerated when dealing with over-saturated pre-pasted material as it shrinks. Back to the method … You see the water tray, filled 3/4 full with clean water. I’ve set it on towels, which are in turn set on top of a thick plastic clear shower curtain. And that’s on top of my usual dropcloths, which are absorbent on the top (blue) side and water-proof on the underside. All this keeps any splashed water from getting onto the clients’ floors. I also sometimes set the water tray in a bathtub, with towels set over the edge of the tub and on the floor.
Continuation from yesterday’s post … the adjoining mud room got the same wallpaper pattern.This room was done with a different run / batch number from yesterday, and the pattern match was better at the seams. See yesterday’s photo.There were, however, some very faint lines running through some of the material. I’ve had this same thing happen recently with other York papers. Very disappointing. Today’s lines were pretty faint, and I went ahead and hung the paper. This paper is by Caitlin Wilson and is in the Sure Strip line by York . It’s a pre-pasted material and very nice … one of my favorite brands.
A few months ago, I papered the adjoining powder room in this same watercolor -y wallpaper pattern. Now that the homeowner’s new custom cabinetry has been installed in the laundry room, I’m papering that area, too. Here’s the before picture.The homeowner made the point that, after all the money they spent on the carpentry, everything was swallowed up by the all-white walls. Well, a little color and pattern from wallpaper changes all that! Besides being beautiful, note how the wallpaper makes the moldings and cabinets stand out. Here the roses look purple … they’re actually more navy blue in color. Close up. The design looks like real watercolor brush strokes. Note there’s a slight pattern mis-match at the seam. This is a very close-up shot. From three feet away, you don’t notice it. Tomorrow I’m hanging another room with the same pattern but from a different run … Let’s see if the pattern matches better in the new run. The pattern is by Caitlin Wilson and is in the Sure Strip line, made by York , one of my favorite manufacturers. This is a unique pre-pasted material, as it’s designed to strip off the wall easily when you redecorate. I like Sure Strip a lot. Do a Search here to read about my install techniques with these. This is a nicely renovated and updated home in the energy corridor / Memorial area of west Houston.
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