The accent wall in a Houston Heights master bedroom where I’m working is a little dark. Here I’ve removed the light sconces , and am getting ready to skim-float to smooth the textured wall . A little more light would be helpful! My bright 100 watt light bulb is screwed into a little gizmo that’s quite handy . It’s a socket for a light bulb that can be plugged into an electrical wall outlet . Alternately, as you can see, because there are two holes in the bottom of the metal prongs , you can slip the ends of the electrical wires into those holes . Of course, you have to be careful that the ends of those two wires ( one white and one black ) don’t touch each other . That could cause a spark and a shock , and maybe even trip the circuit breaker . Oh, and, also, be sure to turn the power off at the switch before doing this. If you want to be extra-cautious, you can kill the circuit at the breaker box – but really, turning off at the wall switch and then taking care not to let the two wires touch each other, will be pretty safe. When ready to work around this improvised lighting , especially with metal tools or wet wallpaper , I will turn off the power at the switch , remove the socket thingie from the wires in the wall , use screw cap wire nuts to cover the exposed wire ends , and tuck the wires a bit into the electrical box . Once the paper’s up in that area, I can reattach the socket and get me some light again. I stumbled upon these things at a garage sale decades ago, and got maybe 10 of them for a buck or two. But they’re still available in electrical departments of places like Home Depot and Lowe’s and our neighborhood favorite here in central Houston – Southland Hardware . They cost about a dollar or a dollar and a half each .
Bad photo, but I’m to put wallpaper in this room, including the tall and deep fir-down at the top right, which has two recessed light fixtures in it. You want the paper to go behind the light fixtures, not cut around them, if at all possible. In the photo, at the far middle left, you can see one fixture dangling by it’s wires below the fir-down.Some of these recessed fixtures are tricky to take down (many won’t come down at all), but these ones turned out to be held in place by tension springs, which fit into sideways hooks, which you can see at the left inside the hole. Here’s a closer look. These are the same type springs that hold the vent covers to exhaust fans in place. As you push them upward, they spread apart and hold the fixture securely in place. Easy-peasy! You can also squeeze the springs together and remove them from the mounting housing, which lets the fixture dangle from its electrical wires.That’s what I’ve done here. Now it’s much easier to work the wallpaper around the fixture. But it could be made even easier – by removing the light fixture all together. Most light fixtures have black and white wires coming from inside the wall that connect to black and white wires on the electrical fixture and are connected and held in place by a twist-on screw cap or wire nut. What’s very cool about this particular fixture’s electrical connections is that it’s made by this orange plug, which fits into the orange receptacle – no wires to twist or cap, and no need to cut off the power. It’s all simple and perfectly safe. Here I’ve disconnected the two orange parts. With the light fixture completely out of the way, it’s much easier to install the wallpaper, and no paste gets slopped onto the fixture.Here’s the wallpaper installed and trimmed around the inside of the opening. Oh, and don’t mind the slight pattern mis-match on the left … there were issues with un-plumb and un-level walls coming into play. And here I’ve reconnected the orange plug parts, and placed the spring back inside those hooks, then pushed the light fixture up and back into place. Look at how nicely the flange (outer ring) of the fixture covers the cut edge of the hole and the wallpaper.
Wallpaper looks better and will have fewer wrinkles and relief cuts , plus there will be fewer cut edges to come loose, when it goes behind objects like switch plates and this thermostat. Here it was a matter of gently pulling off the glass front of the Nest thermostat, then removing two screws on the mounting bracket. I left it connected to the wires in the wall, but pulled the wires out further from the wall so there was more play to work around. I was able to place the wallpaper over this area, cut an “X” where the thermostat was, and then pull both the thermostat and the back plate through the wallpaper. Note: I wrapped the thermostat in plastic before starting, to protect it from wallpaper paste / adhesive . Then put the backplate in place, reattach the thermostat, and then replace the glass front. Smooth the wallpaper into place. All looks perfect!
This is the mounting bracket for a sconce / light fixture . The fixture itself is exactly the same size as the bracket. So it’s unfortunate that the electrician used an electrical box that is too large . As you can see, the blue box shows on both the left and right sides of the light fixture. (I will also add that I think this light fixture is narrower than most – I suspect it was made overseas where boxes and codes are different from here.) In addition, the blue box juts out from the wall and will create a bump under the wallpaper , plus prevent the paper from adhering tightly to the wall . The jaggedly cut drywall will leave impressions under the paper, too. Here the plastic electrical box is recessed better into the wall. But there are still gaps on the left and right sides of the bracket. To get the wallpaper around the brackets without gaps showing , I removed the brackets, and then brought the wallpaper in to cover the electrical junction boxes by about 1.” (no photo) If the electrician needs more space for his wires , he can always trim the wallpaper back a little. In the instance of the box in the top photo, there will still be wallpaper that can’t sit tight to the drywall , but once the sconce is replaced you really won’t notice. I also had the option of leaving the mounting brackets in place and then placing the wallpaper over the metal plates. But first of all, I think this is against building Codes. And second, if the sconces are changed out later, or if someone needs to access the electrical connections, removing the mounting plates would most surely tear the wallpaper in the process. So, best to have the wallpaper behind the plates, rather than pasted on top of them.
These days, most families don’t use these phone jack connections. Why have this cover plate in the middle of the wall, if you’re not using it? Unscrew from the wall, and they’re easy to disconnect. Just push a flat head screwdriver or similar into the latch connection at top and bottom, and ….…. Voilà! The gizmo is disconnected.The wiring is still intact, in case the family wants to reconnect at a future date. For now, I’ve stuffed the wires into the wall … … and covered the hole with wallpaper. The small recessed area is barely noticeable, and looks a whole heck of a lot better than a useless white cover plate.
Most people don’t use phone or cable connections in the wall anymore, so it’s common for me to remove the cover plates, stuff the wires into the box, and cover the hole with the wallpaper.
In this case, the seam was going to fall where there really wasn’t going to be enough wall for the wallpaper to be able to grab ahold of (see top photo). I was worried about the seam coming loose and gaping open.
My solution was to tear a bit of backing from a piece of scrap paper and use it to bridge the area over the hole where the seam would fall. This way, the wallpaper would be able to grab hold of the paper, and the seam would not pop open.
I had to separate the non-woven backing from the textured vinyl surface of the wallpaper. This gave me a thin piece that was not likely to cause ridge under the new wallpaper. It also got rid of the vinyl surface – wallpaper adhesives don’t like to stick to vinyl or other slick surfaces.
I tore the strip because the edges were then slightly feathered, which makes any slight bump under the wallpaper less noticeable.
I put plenty of paste on both sides of the patch strip, so it would stick to both the wall behind it and to the new wallpaper going on top of it.
No photo of the finished area, but it worked perfectly, with the paper and the seam stuck tightly and invisibly to the wall.
Beneath this light switch is an equal-sized hole cut in the wall, with cable wires running behind it, intended probably for a sound or alarm system. The homeowners were not using it, and it had a blank wall plate over it.
Instead of having a white plate of plastic that was not serving any purpose visually clog up the wall, I removed the plate and just let the wallpaper cover the opening.
Right now, you can see a little warped area where the paper is spanning the void. But as the paper dries, it should pull taught and disguise the opening nicely. The mottley color of the wallpaper will further help to obscure the area.
On some light fixtures, the base is barely larger than the electrical box or its mounting plate, so it won’t cover any imperfections in the wall, and it’s essential that the wallpaper comes up exactly to the very edges of the mounting plate. I often remove that mounting plate so the paper can go under it, which gives a neat look.
In this room, the light was changed from one fixture centered over the sink to two wall sconces. The electrician had a hard time fitting the new boxes into the wall. (It is much easier on new construction.)
There are a lot of things going on wrong with these sconce settings, but some are not visible and are difficult to explain. It took me about an hour to figure out what was going on, and how to rectify a box that was cattywhompus in the wall – but that’s a different story.
Here you see a gap because the sconce base is too small to cover the hole for the electrical junction box. This fixture had a larger (3/4″) gap on the other side that is not pictured. In the next photo, the box is extra large, and extends out beyond the small sconce base.
I had to cover up those gaps to make a solid base for the wallpaper to hold on to. In the case of the blue box, I had to smooth over the ridge caused by the thickness of the blue plastic against the wall (to prevent a ring from showing under the wallpaper, all around the fixture).
To bridge the gaps, I used a certain kind of paper, dunked in Gardz, a penetrating wall sealer that dries hard. That essentially recreated the portion of wall that had been cut away. Once that dried, I skim-floated over it with joint compound and then sanded smooth, to even everything out.
I used joint compound again to float all around the ridge on the blue box, and got a perfectly smooth wall.
Since I had been able to remove the mounting plate, I was able to get the wallpaper to fit under it, so no gaps showed around the base. Then I reconnected the wires and rehung the sconces.
As you can see in the finished photo, it turned out great.
Originally, this laundry room had the White Wall Woes – too much of nothing. Once the wallpaper went up, the room took on warmth and a cheery personality. The homeowner, an interior designer, loved the way the pattern made the low ceilings look higher. And the color perfectly melds with the color of the woodwork.
What’s it like to hang wallpaper in a laundry room when the washer & dryer are still in the room? Well, you do a lot of reaching, squeezing, and contorting. Luckily for me, I’m small.
Because my ladder would not fit behind the appliances, I had to stand on the W & D (being careful to distribute my weight to the frame, not the center). This worked out because the ceiling was low enough that I could reach the top of the wall by standing on the W & D.
That took care of the top of the strips of wallpaper. To smooth them into place along the lower portion of the wall, I had to squeeze myself into that narrow space you see in the third photo, and work around all those hoses and wires.
This is a very nicely remodeled bungalow in the Woodland Heights (Houston), with a 2-story addition on the back. This room was in the new section, and it had about the most plumb walls and level floors / ceilings I have worked with – all important when dealing with strong straight lines such as these picture frames.
Nonetheless, I did have to pull a few tricks out of my hat, to keep the pattern looking straight around the whole room and against all the moldings.
This wallpaper is by Sanderson, a British company, and is called “Picture Gallery.” It is on a non-woven substrate and is intended to be a paste-the-wall product, but in this room with complicated cuts and narrow spaces, it was preferable to paste the material.
The interior designer (and home owner) is Stacie Cokinos, of Cokinos Design. All of the jobs I have done for her have been remodels or new builds in the greater Heights area of Houston.
Interestingly enough, I’ve had a number of queries and jobs about wallpaper in laundry rooms. It must be a new trend. I think this newish non-woven material will work well in a humid room, whereas the paper-backed solid vinyls that were popular for decades are a poor choice, due to moisture getting into the seams and causing curling.
And you just have to love the idea of doing mundane housework in a cherry, pretty setting!
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