Tricky Outside Corner

One of the rules of wallpaper hanging is that you don’t wrap long strips around outside corners – especially when another strip will be butted up against it.

Drywall corners are never 100% plumb, and most have some sort of bow.

The 3/8″ – 1/2″ bit of paper presents additional challenges. Besides the fact that is is 100% likely that it will not wrap around the corner perfectly straight, the tension involved in wrapping that little bit of paper around the corner means that it will want to not lie down flat, and will have a hard time lying down tight to the wall.

The 1/2″ of wallpaper did NOT wrap around the corner in a straight line. The middle section bowed to the left, and the top and bottom edges were drawn closer to the corner bead, and were narrower than the center section.

The answers to this would be to

~let the new strip of wallpaper gap at the top and bottom sections of the wall

~cut the paper vertically along the edge, and position the sliced-off 38″ piece on the new surface, and butt the subsequent strip next to it. This would keep the pattern intact, but present the same challenge of trying to butt the straight edge of the new strip up against a wavy edge of that 3/8″ wide strip. It would also leave a visible cut edge, as well as cut edges that might come loose as people walk past and brush against the wall

~cut the paper vertcally along the edge, and then throw away the 3/8″ wide strip, and place the subsequent strip next to it. You would still have a cut edge showing, but you would not have the wavy 3/8″ strip. However, since 3/8″ of the design would have been cut off and discarded, there would be a very noticeable pattern mis-match.

Quandry!

But the wallpaper came to the rescue! This paper (see previous post for brand info) was incredibly malleable and manipulable. I was able to match the pattern perfectly, and hang the new strip and push / pull it into position so it met the wavy edge of the previous strip without any visible gaps of overlaps.

Wrapping around the next corner to the left was the next hurdle, because now we had both a left and a right outside corner that were not straight, causing the left edge of the new strip to be really warped.

Not going to get into a long explanation here, but, again, because the paper itself was very malleable, and because the subsequent strip (not shown) around the left corner was only 3 1/2 wide and also very manipulable, and because the non-woven wallpapers don’t shrink when they dry, this series of walls and turns and Van Gogh wallpaper looked great, with no wrinkles, gapping or white lines at the seams.