The wall has been skim-floated and sanded smooth , primed , and is ready for wallpaper .The homeowner did a great job coordinating the wall and ceiling paint with the colors in the wallpaper. This is a room that’s made for sleeping!At first I thought the pattern scale was too small for the large wall. But once I saw it on the wall, I really like the way it fills the space. To me, this pattern has a sort of calico look. Close-up shows the light texture on the paper. This is a non-woven material, so I’m installing via the paste the wall method . Here I’ve cut and arranged all my strips in the order in which they will be hung . This is a drop match pattern , which some folks think of as A and B strips. Meaning, for instance, an orange flower appears at the top of the wall on Strip A . But the next strip, Strip B, has a yellow flower at the top. When you get to the third strip, we are back to an A and an orange flower. Next comes another B strip – and so on. I’ve rolled the strips backward , with the top of the strip coming off first. This will prevent the printed face of the wallpaper from bumping into the pasted wall during installation . Wallpaper often shrinks a tad when the paste dries , and this can result in very minute gaps at the seams . With dark wallpapers , it’s pretty important to take steps to prevent white from showing at these gaps. Here I’ve measured out where each seam will fall, and taken diluted black paint to make a dark stripe under each seam . I don’t make the paint full-strength, because wallpaper paste isn’t formulated to adhere to paint. I want the wallpaper adhering to the primer I’ve applied. That’s also the reason why you don’t want to roll paint over the whole wall. Also, I have only striped some of the seam areas, and will wait until some strips are up on the wall before striping more lines. This is because wallpaper expands when it gets wet with paste, which can make it difficult to plot the exact width of each strip as you move across the wall. I use acrylic craft paint from the hobby store, applied with a bit of sponge. I keep a small dish of water to dip the sponge into, which dilutes the paint a bit. You also see a stick of chalk pastel . See next photo.Besides the wall peeking out from behind the wallpaper seams , it’s also possible / probable that the white edges of the wallpaper backing / substrate will show at the seams. I take a stick of chalk and run it along the edges, making sure to apply from the backside, to avoid getting chalk onto the surface of the wallpaper. Be sure to use chalk pastels and not oil pastels – oil will bleed and stain wallpaper. Some installers use liquid paint or markers – again, be sure to use water-based or acrylic , and never oil based or permanent markers . BN Walls is the brand. Altogether, this was a pretty nice product to work with. It was thin and very soft and flexible (many non-wovens are not).I wasn’t happy with all the seams, though. I believe the paper was cut with dull or wobbly wheels at the factory, because the edges seemed to not be perfectly straight . So I ended up with gaps and overlaps in some areas. Here you can see the wallpaper edges pouching up a bit due to excess paper. But, as I mentioned, this material was quite flexible, so it was pretty easy to spread these edges apart an use a tool to push them apart and then down to prevent them from pouching up again. Once the paste started to dry, these areas held nice and tight and flat. This is a townhome in the Rice Military neighborhood of central Houston .
Re my previous post , it’s very common for wallpaper to shrink just a tad when the paste dries, and this can leave you with teeny gaps at the seams. So when hanging a dark paper like this, I like to stripe a band of black paint under where the seams will fall. This way, if the paper does gap at the seams, you will see dark, and not the white wallpaper primer . I measure and plot where each seam will fall and then run a stripe of diluted water-based craft paint (from Michael’s or Texas Art Supply) under where the seam will be. I wet a scrap of sponge and dip it in the paint, adding water as needed. Don’t make it too thick or dark. Because you want the wallpaper adhering to the wallpaper primer underneath all this. On top of the wallpaper primer, the craft paint dries pretty quickly. But I use a heat gun to be sure the paint is good and dry before hanging each strip. Don’t paint more than one or two stripes at a time, because wallpaper stretches and expands when it gets wet with paste , and it’s difficult to predict exactly where each seam will fall. For the same reason, be sure your stripes are at least 1/2″ wide, if not a full inch. Additionally, I’ll take a pastel chalk (NOT an oil pastel – oil stains wallpaper) and run it from the backside along the white edges of the wallpaper, to prevent any white edges from showing at the seams. Do a Search here to see previous posts about that trick .
Wallpaper expands a bit when it gets wet with wallpaper paste (3/8″ in this case), and then shrinks when it dries. This can result in the white edges of the paper showing, or the wall behind peeking out from teeny gaps. With a dark paper like this, it can be noticeable. I ran a piece of black chalk along both edges of the paper to cover the white substrate (no photo). It’s important to use chalk and not oil pastel, as oil will stain wallpaper. Then, to keep the the wall from peeping through, I striped the area on the wall under where the seams would fall with black paint. Not shown, I used my heat gun to speed along the drying of this stripe. I don’t make the paint too thick, because you want the wallpaper seams sticking to the wallpaper primer, not to the paint. All this takes a good bit of time. Also, it’s tricky to plot ahead, because, due to the expansion factor, it’s difficult to know exactly where the seams are going to fall. Non-woven materials don’t expand, but papers like this one will. I use paint from the hobby store or Texas Art Supply, run along the wall with a small chunk of sponge, dipped in water.
After determining the pattern match – which was no small feat on this very eye-crossing design – I am measuring and cutting my strips.
Those that have already been cut are rolled up and placed in the order they will be hung.
There is a piece of dark chalk I am using to color the edges of the paper, to prevent the white backing from peaking out at the seams.
And to keep the white primer from doing the same, you can see that I have plotted out where the seams will fall, and have striped black paint on the wall.
I don’t need my work table for this job, because it’s a paste-the-wall material, so no need for a table to paste on. And there are no corners to turn, so no need for a table to trim on.
The pattern has a crocodile hide look.
This Superfresco brand is by Graham & Brown. It is an embossed (textured) vinyl on a non-woven backing – which has a fibrous, fiber-glass composition, and is made to strip off the wall easily and in one piece when it’s time to redecorate.
This material was a lot more pliable than most non-wovens, so it was quite nice to work with. Although there was some stretching and warping. On a longer wall, that could have caused some panels to develop wrinkles.
I hung this wallpaper in a recessed headboard niche / accent wall in the master bedroom of a newish home in the Rice Village area of Houston.
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