Here I’m moving right to left, fixin’ to have my last strip of wallpaper meet up with the first strip I hung (which you see on the left). Because the corners are never perfectly straight, and because wallpaper can stretch when it gets wet with paste , and for other reasons, it’s not possible to pre-trim the width of this last strip, because it won’t be the exact perfect width. So you cut this strip 1/2″-1″ wider than the gap. That means that it’s going to wrap 1/2″ or so around that corner. So you’ll have to trim off the excess. In this way, you’ll be able to get a custom fit into that corner. But, you’ll also get paste slopped onto that strip on the left. Some papers you can wipe the paste off easily. But others are more delicate and can be damaged or stained . Why take a chance?Here is the strip that’s going to fill that gap. I’ve paste it . Next I’ve run a strip of thin blue plastic tape along the edge that will be overlapped onto the existing wallpaper in the corner. This will keep paste from coming in contact with the wall on the left. I also like to place this tape on the top of the strip, to protect the ceiling. Especially important when there is not crown molding and the paste will be bopping into the flat paint on the ceiling (difficult to wipe off). You can do a Search here to see other posts where I have photos of the trimming taking place, and then removing the excess paper and the blue tape. Here you see the finished corner . This blue tape is pretty useful. It’s also helpful when double-cutting ( splicing ). Another great feature of this blue tape is that it snaps apart quite easily, so you don’t need a scissors or blade to cut your pieces. It’s imported from Japan. (Those guys have a lot of cool wallpaper tools.) It can be purchased here https://www.wallpapertoolstore.com/product/blue-cut-tape/ Some people use waxed paper cut into strips, or yellow caution tape, or painter’s plastic cut into strips. But nothing parallels the usefulness and quality of this blue cut tape .
Two weeks before a job is to start, I send my clients a “check list” so they know how to prepare for Install Day. It includes things like check to be sure it’s the right wallpaper pattern, how I can get into the house if the homeowner is away, how much space I need for my set-up, etc.
It also says quite clearly that all construction work has to be completed, and there needs to be electricity, light, nearby running water, and no workmen coming in while I’m working, and no workmen coming in later who might mess up the paper.
This ensures that I will have optimum working conditions (I need lights so I can see what I’m doing. I need water so I can keep your paper clean.) And you don’t want Bubba coming to hook up a light fixture and put his sweaty hands all over the new wallpaper in the process. Or a painter coming to touch up, who decides to “protect” the new wallpaper by putting blue tape on it. Of course, when he removes the tape, the surface ink or the wallpaper itself will come along with it.
Yet you would not believe how many people – innocently or desperately – tell me they are “ready” when they really are not. Here is an example of a house that is not ready for wallpaper. It is very likely that the paper will be damaged by tradesmen who come to “finish up.”
Baseboard is not in place. When positioning the baseboard, it’s likely the carpenter will bang into the wallpaper. When painting, you can bet the painter will get paint onto the new wallpaper. Or, as mentioned above, he will use tape that, when he goes to remove it, will pull the inked surface and / or the paper itself off the wall.
Door molding is not in place. Same issues as above.
No electrical outlet in the room. What if I need to use a fan or heat gun? And wallpaper will sit tighter to the wall if I can put the plate cover in place immediately.
The electrician is not finished. This switch sticking out of the wall is just plain dangerous. In addition, when he time comes to finish whatever it is he’s working on, he will probably put his greasy hands on the wallpaper, or lean his scratchy tool belt against the paper.
My checklist says I need clean, running water in the immediate area. It specifically says NOT a hose in the yard. Yet look where I had to get my water. (I was working on the THIRD floor.) This house had no faucets, no drains, and not even a working toilet.
There can be reasons for unstable walls, mostly cheap or poor quality paint, dust, someone applied paint over dust, improper prep, incompatible layers inside the wall built up over years (oil based paint, latex paint, dust, gloss paint, joint compound, etc.).
These can cause problems with wallpaper, mostly with the layers delaminating (coming apart), which causes the wallpaper seams to come away from the wall. Sometimes sheets of wallpaper simply fall off the wall.
This isn’t so much a problem with paint, because it just sits on the surface. But wallpaper shrinks when the paste dries, or expands and contracts with humidity, and can put tension on the seams
Before wallpaper goes up, one way to test for such unstable surfaces is the tape test . Use a razor blade to cut an “X” into the wall, scoring through the paint and maybe into a few layers beneath. Place a strip of blue painters tape over the cut. Pull the tape off the wall.
If paint comes away from the wall along with the tape, or if layers inside the wall come apart, you know you have to do a lot of specialized prep to stabilize the wall before hanging / installing the wallpaper.
This example is an interesting twist. The homeowner used a piece of tape to hold up a wallpaper sample. Then used an ink pen to write notes on it. When removed, the tape took the paint off – in the shape of the writing!
The instruction sheet was rolled up inside this bolt of stringcloth wallcovering . As you can see, some of the ink came off and discolored the wallpaper . This is not uncommon. I had to throw away the first 10″ or so of paper (about 2 sq ft of paper). Other things can damage the ends of rolls , too, like tape , impressions / dents created by labels or packaging , edges banged up during shipping , and more. Another reminder to always purchase extra paper .
Panel of wallpaper lying on my pasting table. The left edge will go up against a painted wall that is not to be wallpapered. It’s important to keep paste off this wall, because the paste can cause the paint to crackle and flake off. Yes, you can wipe paste off the wall, especially if it’s a gloss paint. But better to not get paste on the wall in the first place. So I’ve placed a strip of this cool blue plastic tape along the edge. It sticks to the pasted wallpaper, but will not let paste get onto the wall. Here is the wallpaper in place, with the little 1″ overage wrapping onto the wall to the left. See how the blue tape is preventing paste from getting onto the wall? Once I finish trimming, I will remove both the excess paper and the blue tape. Be sure to remove any blue tape that is still behind the wallpaper. This also works for ceilings and for abutting another strip of wallpaper. This tape is much better than painter’s plastic or ” caution tape ” because it is lightly tinted so you can see it, it’s translucent so you can see through it, it has the perfect body – thicker than painter’s plastic but more flexible than caution tape, and has a unique textured surface that makes it handle nicely, plus you can easily snap it apart so there is no need for scissors or razor blades. It’s made in Japan and tricky to get. If you’re interested, email me at wallpaperlady@att.net and I’ll hook you up with the supplier. The very edgy wallpaper? It’s by Spoonflower and called Serpents and Apples .
Here’s the wall after I stripped, sealed, skim-floated, sanded, and primed it. Finished. The birds in the pattern balanced nicely with between the ceiling line and the wainscoting. I had more success with this install than the previous guy, due to proper prep, and also the material used this time was the user-friendly non-woven , rather than the old fashioned pulp type wallpaper the other guy had to wrestle with. Strawberry Thief is a very popular pattern right now, and comes in many colorways. Do a Search here to see my other installations of this design.There were some issues at the top of the wainscoting where the painters had used tape to mask off areas, long with caulk, an it left a rather large (1/8″) unpainted area between the wood molding and the wall. I filled this in with joint compound and primed it, and wallpaper would have adhered just fine. But that would have left a white gap between the wallpaper and the green molding. I rummaged in my truck for the best matching paint I could come up with, and painted over the white edge. This would have left a bit of a thin brown line between the wallpaper and the green molding. It would have looked OK, but I had an idea to get rid of the gap altogether.If I had used my regular thin straightedge (the red one), it would have let me trim the bottom edge of the wallpaper nice and close to the wall. But that would have left the aforementioned brown line showing. So I used the metal plate you see at the upper right of the photo as a trim guide. It’s thicker than my red straightedge, and so gives a fat cut that leaves more wallpaper and less of that brown line. In fact, the left edge, as you can see, is rolled, and that creates an even thicker edge to trim against, leaving even more wallpaper at the bottom of the cut. See the photo just above, to see how the wallpaper now completely covers the brown line. These metal plates have a lot of other uses. They are made and sold by a fellow member of the Wallcovering Installers Association . She makes a lot of other cool tools, too. If you are interested, send me an email. wallpaperlady@att.net The wallpaper design is by William Morris , a famed artist of the Arts & Crafts / Art Nouveau periods . The brand is Morris & Co. This label is EXACTLY the same as the pulp material the original installer worked with – save for that one word non-woven . Be sure you get the non-woven version, which is also called paste the wall . The home is in the Heights neighborhood of Houston .
This couple in the West University neighborhood of Houston loves color and avant garde – unexpected and fun! I hung this Honshu wallpaper by Thibaut in their small hallway at the beginning of the pandemic – April 2020. Since then, they decided to change the faucets and showerhead in the bathroom on the other side of this wall. To access the pipes, the plumber had to cut a hole in the drywall. The ‘guy’ that this couple uses did a fantastic job of cutting the drywall, preserving the wallpaper, and then patching the hole. You can even see that his cuts are perfectly level and plumb! Slapping wallpaper patches over the two holes would have probably sufficed. But I wanted to make it better, so I stripped off and replaced the old wallpaper. This meant patching the guy’s drywall repairs. I didn’t get a photo, but I used drywall tape and joint compound to even out the areas. A heavy duty floor fan plus a heat gun helped get the smoothing compound to dry in a few hours. I sanded smooth and applied wallpaper primer, and ended up with what you see in the photo.To conserve paper, instead of replacing the entire two strips from ceiling to floor, which could have caused some problems with matching the pattern on the left side, I patched in about one foot down from the ceiling line. To disguise the appliqued area, I used a scissors and trimmed around the wallpaper design, as you see here. This is less visible than a straight horizontal cut. In this photo, the two strips have been put into place. You could never tell there was a hole (or two) !
Smudged pattern. Mis-aligned pattern. Sometimes manufacturers will use tape to flag ” issues ” like a defect or a spliced piece. But there was nothing of note where this red tape had been placed. It was impossible to remove the tape without lifting the ink off the paper. So a full strip of wallpaper was wasted. This red tape popped up in two different bolts of paper.
In addition, I had another full length strip the was ruined by a small stain. It might have been overlooked, but it was going to fall right at eye level in an entryway. Also, the pattern was such that I could not pull any of my tricks, like cutting a flower out of scrap paper and pasting it over the stain.
Read below for info. After pasting the wallpaper, I apply the plastic strip to the pasted side of the top, then book the paper, making sure to not let the tape contact any of the wet pasted areas.
The red stripe you see is plastic “Danger” tape from the home improvement store. You can also use yellow “Caution” tape. Some installers use painter’s plastic cut into strips … although I find it too flimsy. I put this on the back / pasted side of my wallpaper strips to keep paste off the ceiling, woodwork, etc. And, as you see to the left of the top photo, when you bring a strip of wallpaper up against another strip, such as in your final corner, the plastic tape will prevent paste from transferring onto or staining the other strip of wallpaper.
After I make my trim cuts, I remove the excess wallpaper and the plastic tape – making sure to get the parts on both sides of my cut.
Now the paste can reach the wall surface, and adhere the wallpaper securely, with no paste residue left on the ceiling, molding, or wallpaper.
One way to (hopefully) prevent an unstable wall from delaminating to to hang a liner paper. A liner is a special paper that goes on first, and your finish paper goes on top. Usually, liners are hung horizontally rather than vertically. The idea is that the seams of the two papers will not line up, so that eliminates the worry of stress from drying and shrinking wallpaper tugging at the wall surface below. But liners add more materials cost, and also labor cost to hang it, plus time, because it has to dry overnight. This homeowner had already shelled out a lot of money for this Schumacher (high end brand) “Acanthus” pattern. So I devised a method to do a “mini-liner” effect. I took liner paper and cut 2″ strips, and applied them to the wall under where the seams would fall. Here I am using my laser level to mark where the next seam would fall. Next I rolled paste on the wall, and then I applied the strip of liner paper. The liner will straddle the area where the seam lands, and thus disperse the tension on the wall across its width. Any stress put on the unstable wall will be covered by the liner strip and by the wallpaper, hopefully preventing any chance of delamination (the wall coming apart).I like the product I used today because it’s “non-woven” material, which has a high polyester content and shouldn’t shrink or tear. But it’s not as thin as I thought … I had hoped the thin strips would be undetectable under the textured grasscloth. But I was disappointed that, in certain lighting, the vertical ridges from this very thin material do show a tiny bit. I was unable to go back and open the seam and remove the strips, because – you guessed it – the surfaces of the wall began to come apart. Tomorrow I will try a different material. The next day I tried a trick recommended by colleagues on my paperhanger’s Facebook page – to use cash register receipt print-out tape, available at office supply stores. This material is a lot thinner – but it is also not nearly as strong. I hope it holds up to the tension placed on the seams by the wallpaper. It is thin, and much less noticeable under the textured grasscloth … although I did see one area where the vertical ridge was just just barely detectable under the paper.
This is a grasscloth pattern called ” Acanthus ” by Schumacher.
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