Fun Kill Point With Schumacher Versailles

The kill point is your last corner in a room, where your last strip of wallpaper meets up with the first strip you hung hours ago. This virtually always results in a pattern mis-match, In the photo above, if I were to add the next strip of wallpaper to the right of the striped section, in the order it’s supposed to be hung, a mis-match would result when that design lands in the corner and bumps against the leaves and flowers to the right.

I thought I could make it look better. Instead of matching the pattern in proper sequence coming from the left, I decided to cut a fresh strip and match it with the strip on the right.

This gave me a perfect pattern match. But left me with a 1″ gap between the strips.

I could fill that gap in with a strip of plain blue paper, cut from scrap wallpaper in the trash pile. But this particular pattern didn’t have any areas with 1″ width of unprinted paper. So I used my straightedge and a razor blade and cut two 1/2″ wide strips of paper the height of this area over the door.

Here I have placed the first of these next to the strip on the right.

Here I have butted the second 1/2″ strip up against the first one, and am tucking it underneath the striped strip to its left. The vertical lines in the design will disguise any ridges caused by the overlap. Besides – who’s gonna notice this 9′ up, anyway?

Here it is, finished and smoothed into place. Note that these strips are still wet, and will be homogeneous in color once they all dry.

Here’s the finished corner. Remember – it still needs to dry. You can’t notice that there’s an inch of extra blue space in there.

From a distance.

Three More Walls of the Schumacher Versailles

Master bedroom before. White. Boring.

After. Warm, classic, and a touch of French. Much better suited to this 1920 home in the Houston Heights.

Headboard wall.

The pattern fits perfectly in the header space over the doors. The dark area in the upper corner will lighten as the wallpaper dries.

Close-up.

I was very pleased with the seams on this product. They went together nicely, with no gaps or overlaps. And I was doubly happy that the paper did not shrink much as it dried, so no white wall peeping out from gaping seams.

I love the slight texture of this raised ink surface print wallpaper.

I’m not usually a fan of the Schumacher brand, but this product’s install went very well.

A Second Centered Wall In the Same Room – Tricky Feat

Re my previous post, about centering the pattern on the fireplace wall … Once a wallpaper pattern has been positioned on the first wall, as subsequent strips are placed around the room, the pattern falls in its proper sequence. Meaning, you have no control over how the design will land on all the other walls.

In this room, I felt it was important for the design to be centered on the fireplace wall (see previous post). But the headboard wall was equally visually prominent, and it would sure look best if the scalloped design could be centered on this wall, too. But the way the wallpaper strips were following each other, the pattern would fall off-center when it hit this wall.

I thought I could make it look better. It took careful engineering, precise measurements, a laser level, some secret tricky techniques, and a whole lot of time (coupla hours). But I got the swoopy design centered behind the bed and between the windows and light fixtures, so the whole area looks perfectly balanced.

To achieve this, I had to ” shrink ” the design above and below the windows. (Do a Search here to see other posts explaining this process.) And I did end up with a pattern mis-match in the corner to the left (sorry, it’s not visible in this photo). But I figured that a mis-match in a corner 17″ from the floor, plus a 4″ high section over a window were a fair trade-off for that beautiful symmetrical headboard wall.

For the record, I worked it out so that the mis-match in the corner was only about 1.5″ off from the actual match. No one’s gonna notice! So sorry I forgot to photograph this.

I will say that the features of this room, as well as the way the pattern was printed on the wallpaper, plus the pattern itself, helped immensely to achieve this balanced outcome.

The design is called Versailles and is by Schumacher.