Well, I still haven’t finished the grasscloth wallpaper in the bedroom suite foyer, despite working on it for six hours yesterday. Pooh. I made really good progress, but I knew the foyer would be a challenge. Even though it’s a relatively small room, there are three doors that I need to work around, two of which required trim removal and one of which had a very unique situation.
Those doors with the trim really slowed me down. I thought I would never get the piece off the bathroom door (future storage room). This trim has been there for about ten years and was installed back when I used construction adhesive on every piece of trim I installed. I was quickly reminded why I no longer use construction adhesive. It’s overkill and is almost never needed, but if you have to remove the trim it will destroy the drywall.
And then when you want to reuse the trim, you’re left with a mess that you have to clean up before it can be reused.
But I finally got that cut. I cleaned up the drywall a bit and cleaned the back of this panel. Then I wallpapered the wall and reinstalled the trim. I’ll show you all how this all turned out once I’m done with all the wallpaper and tidying up the entire area.
The biggest challenge I faced yesterday was installing the grasscloth wallpaper around the closet door. I wasn’t really sure how this would work, and yet it remains a “figure it out as you go” kind of thing. But in order to be able to wrap the grasscloth around the side jamb of the doorway and cover the entire jamb, I was left with nothing to cover the top jamb in the right corner.
So it looks like the top post needs to be covered with a completely separate piece of wallpaper. We’ll see if I can get this done and make it look like one continuous piece of wallpaper instead of two separate pieces.
When the piece was finished, I liked the overall look, but there were two issues that I didn’t like. At first I thought I could just trim the edge of the wallpaper on the closet side of the door jamb with a very clean cut and leave it at that. But even with a really clean cut it just looks unfinished to me.
Here’s a view from the side of the closet. Ignore the noticeable spots of dark blue paint on the trim. These need to be touched up with the light blue. But as for the grass cloth, I don’t like how that looks when it’s just a dead end there.
So I think I’ll add a small piece of trim right along the edge to give it a clean finish. I’m going to paint this piece a dark teal to match the wallpaper, and I’m going to put it around the door jamb on the wallpapered areas.
I think I’ll be a lot happier with it when the cut is finished. It will give it a much more finished look, but of course that’s just another thing on my list to do now. At least it’s not a big project, but I thought I was done trimming, so it feels like I’m going backwards a little.
But the bigger problem is that when I picked up the piece and stood back to look at it, I saw that this piece was noticeably darker than the one next to it. It was the very first piece of a new roll of wallpaper, and this roll is noticeably darker than the previous roll.
And it’s not just the lighting, because it’s darker from every angle.
I was disappointed to see that. I don’t necessarily want a darker color to frame the door. And I’m not sure if taking it off and replacing it would help at all, because like I said, it was the first piece of a brand new roll of wallpaper. I have this roll and then another roll left over, so I think I might actually end up with three additional pieces of wallpaper. However, there is no guarantee that replacing it with a different part will make a difference, as my options are to replace it with a part of the same roll, which will probably be the same color, or replace it with a part of that last roll, and there is no guarantee if that solves anything. For all I know, this final throw could be just as dark.
So I decided to take my chance and see if I could rub some paint off this piece with a wet rag. As you can see here, the wet rag definitely removed some of the paint.
I only edited a small area for testing. You can see it below. It’s this square that looks darker because it’s wet.
But once it was dry, it actually looked a little lighter.
It didn’t fit together perfectly, but it was easier. The problem is that I didn’t remove enough paint right at the seam, so the seam appears darker.
I tried it again to remove even more dye and that seemed to work really well.
However, this seam is still darker, so I’m not sure if it will actually work. But I’ll do the rest and see if I can get it to look good. I don’t need it to be perfect. The beauty of grasscloth is its imperfections. But I want to at least try before playing with a completely new piece, which will be a risk since it’s possible that a new piece will raise exactly the same problem.
Be that as it may, progress continues, but there have been some obstacles along the way. Overall, however, I am very happy with the result. I can’t wait to hang the last few pieces (I think I have four more pieces to hang) and then clean up and clear out the entire area so we can see the finished grasscloth in all its glory. Since I don’t have time to work on it today, I’ll tackle it again tomorrow.
I really hope that I can overcome these last few challenges and work out the last few details so that I can be finished with this project by the end of tomorrow and be ready to move on to the next project. The fabric for the headboard and hallway bench should be here today, so I’ll look forward to moving on to other projects once I have the fabric in hand.
