Humidity Causes Curling Edges on Vinyl / Non-Woven Wallpaper

I hung this wallpaper about 10 years ago. It’s a main bathroom in a 1920’s home in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston. The home has been remodeled including updated HVAC systems , but surely still suffering from issues of humidity and air circulation.
At some point, the very edges of the wallpaper started curling back at the seams. This is more pronounced at the upper portions of the wall than at the chair rail. Meaning, humidity from showering is rising into the air, collecting under the ceiling, and working its way into the seams.
Once humidity gets into the backing of the wallpaper, it can cause the backing to expand. When that happens, the paper has to go somewhere. So it pushes itself away from the wall. Hence the curling that you see here.
What’s odd to me is that this happened with a paper that’s on a non-woven backing. Non-wovens are 20% polyester, so pretty resistant to moisture and humidity. I’m guessing that this company used less than the industry standard of 20% polyester. The material was super thin and flexible, which is unlike most non-wovens I’ve worked with.

I was able to make this look pretty good again. I used a putty knife to gently lift the compromised edges away from the wall, and then I worked some of my regular wallpaper paste back behind there. (no super glue or heavy duty paste or contact cement )
Then I used my heat gun – set on Low – to gently warm up the vinyl surface of the wallpaper . The heat gun served several purposes … It helped speed the drying of the paste , so it got tacky and held more quickly and firmly. The heat gun also ” melted ” the vinyl surface a wee bit, so it would curl back in the opposite direction.
I used a 3″ stiff metal putty knife to push the two edges of wallpaper back down to the wall. The metal knife heated up, too, and helped to get the vinyl to conform.
Using the heat gun and the metal putty knife also helped the two edges from the two strips to meet up together … sort of like two mountain big horn sheep butting their heads together . Butted together this way is better than one lying on top of the other.
I was really pleased with how well this worked. Sorry – no pics!

The brand is Super Fresco Easy .

Woeful Walls

The walls in this powder room have a sort of sad and even hopeless feel about them.
It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why.

The bottom edge where the wall meets the baseboard looks uneven and unstable, with and odd lip running along the top of the baseboard.

And a lot of it has to do with the dull color, and the thick layer of gummy latex paint. The gloss finish adds to the tacky look.
It also doesn’t help that there is a lot of lint and other stuff stuck in the paint, creating a gritty and uneven wall surface.
Oh, and the texture that was rolled on is irregular and icky.

There was a lot of globby stuff – caulk and some loose edges – along the edge of this vanity. I took a razor and putty knife and dug out what I could.
And note the ridge along the top of the baseboard. Can’t expect wallpaper to grab ahold and adhere to that.

Likewise there was a lot of caulk along the top of the vanity backsplash. I dug out what I could of that, too.
And finally I figured out what was causing a large part of the problem … The room had been wallpapered previously. So when it was decided to paint the room, instead of stripping off the paper as they should have, they just painted over it. To me, it looks like there are several layers of thick latex paint on top of the wallpaper.

Yep. Sure enough! Along the electrical outlet you can clearly see the old wallpaper under all this mess.
As you can see, the latex paint is not adhering tightly to the old wallpaper. The wallpaper looks like it could be vinyl … and not much sticks well to vinyl. Think Colorforms.
Stripping off all this paint and the wallpaper under it would make a HUGE mess. So, short of re-drywalling the whole room (and the rest of the house, which has the same treatment), there’s not much that can be done to ensure that the layers inside this wall are stable.
I dug out caulk and pulled off any loose areas. Then I skim-floated the whole room to create a new, smooth layer on top. I’ll post more when that process is finished and the new wallpaper is up.

Reattaching Curling Seams on Vinyl

I hung this Bankun Raffia woven fabric-backed wallpaper a few years ago. Some of the edges along the tile and over the shower and below the window had begun to curl. This is mainly due to

` Not wanting to adhere to the porous tile grout
` Humidity from the shower
` Moisture inside the wall, or coming through the window frame

The few areas that had an inch of paper that was loose called for wallpaper paste. But for the very edges, my “secrete weapon” of clear silicone caulk was the solution. Caulk is tacky and grabs more quickly than wallpaper paste. And it will hold tighter against the aggressive curl of the vinyl.

That aggressive curl is a bit of a beast. But I have another “secrete weapon” that is up to taming the beast – a heat gun.

Be careful using it, and practice first, so as not to damage the vinyl. But judiciously applied heat will relax the vinyl just enough that it will release its curl and lie back neatly into it’s original position against the wall.

In the picture, the putty knife is for pulling the loose edges away from the wall so I can get paste and caulk behind the paper. The white smoother is for pushing the paper against the wall. The putty knife was also a good option here, because it withstood the heat of the heat gun better than the plastic smoother.