I’m not a professional wallpaper installer, but I’m not a newbie either. I’ve installed wallpaper several times and never in my life have I had as many problems with wallpaper as I did with the wallpaper in my studio bathroom. While I was hoping to show up this morning with a completely wallpapered bathroom, I took the opposite route. I gave up and started tearing the wallpaper off the wall.
This is very unlike me. I’m not a quitter and I don’t give up easily. I change my mind quite often, but generally it’s not because I’ve given up. The very fact that I gave up on installing this wallpaper shows how frustrated I was with the entire process and how hopeless I felt the situation was. The problems I encountered could not be resolved.
When I hung the first piece I was so excited to see all those COLORS on the wall! It was the moment I had been waiting for. I really wanted to see these walls bathed in color. And the first piece went well. But when I published the second piece, I knew there would be problems. I don’t know if you can see the first problem I encountered in this photo.
If you can’t see it, let me explain. The Spoonflower wallpaper is printed so that the pieces actually overlap each other by about 3/4 inch. I knew that when I ordered it. So my floral mural was on the studio wall, and it was fine. Even when I look for these overlaps on the wall, I can’t see them.
And these overlaps, in my opinion, make installation much easier. But there is a big difference between a wallpaper with a lush floral pattern and a wallpaper with solid color squares. The busyness of the floral mural hides these overlaps from view. But on the wallpaper with the colorful, solid squares, these overlaps are visible. It may be subtle in pictures, but in person it wasn’t so subtle, especially for a perfectionist like me. These are things I can’t see.
So for all of the following pieces I decided to cut the extra 3/4 inch off each piece of wallpaper. That wasn’t a big deal. Using a straight edge and a razor blade, it only took a few minutes to trim each piece. I could have dealt with it if that had been the only problem.
But of course that wasn’t the only problem. When attaching the second piece, I damaged the bottom portion of the wallpaper while trying to apply it around the door panel. Since the wallpaper is just a bunch of squares, I thought I could piece this area together since I had a lot of leftovers. However, I didn’t quite succeed on my first attempt, but I had left it on long enough for the wet wallpaper to attack the primer layer underneath. So when I took this little piece off, it loosened the primer and also some of the drywall mud from the wall. I don’t think this would have happened if I had let it dry completely before removing it.
So all I had left was this small part of the damaged wall. I was beyond frustrated by this considering how much time and effort I had put into getting these walls completely smooth before I started wallpapering.
I tried not to let it defeat me. I just left it alone and moved on. But I knew it would be quite a hassle to repair this damage in a small area surrounded by wallpaper.
But I moved on to the next piece. I was in a pretty bad mood at this point, but I carried on. And of course the next piece had to be the trickiest of all, with just that tiny strip of wallpaper that needed to be cut around the door panel. I thought I would never get this piece dressed and cut, but I finally did.
But to be honest, this one piece hit me so hard and frustrated me so much that I decided it wouldn’t be wise to continue. So I got some sleep and started the next day with a much better attitude. I just knew that if I could get around all of these obstacles and get to the two solid walls in the room, I would be home free. These solid walls would be a breeze compared to working on the door trim. But before I got there I had to install the part that wrapped around the corner. And that was the last straw for me.
There is no room in any house that has perfectly square corners from top to bottom. This is not a problem when laying wallpaper with a lively pattern. The imperfections of the corners are hidden by the pattern. I had this problem with my closet, but because the wallpaper is so full, you can’t see that the pattern isn’t perfectly aligned when you wrap it around the corner. No one is going to stand in my closet and look at the yellow flowers at the top of the wall and see that the flowers on the window wall of the closet don’t meet the trim in exactly the same place as they do on the side wall.
However, if you are installing wallpaper with a very linear design, it is important that the lines in the wallpaper remain completely flat even when cornering. It would be very noticeable if these horizontal lines were shifted 1/4 inch and the pattern moved up the sidewall. But when I got the pattern perfectly level and perfectly wrapped around the corner at the top of the wall, there was excess paper left in the corner toward the middle of the wall. And no matter what I did, and no matter how hard I tried to corner that excess to hide it, there was no hiding it. It was chaos.
And that’s the point at which I gave up. Let’s just say that I learned the hard way that wallpaper with a very linear design (i.e. lots of horizontal lines) should never be used in an entire room. Maybe a professional wallpaper installer could have done it, but for us DIYers it’s nothing but sadness and frustration. This type of wallpaper is great for a special wall where you only apply it on one wall from corner to corner. But if you need to wrap it around corners, just forget about it.
It goes without saying that I am incredibly disappointed and still very frustrated about the whole thing. I’m not usually a quitter, but I was relieved to be able to throw in the towel in this case. Now of course I have to come up with another idea. Now that I’ve seen the wallpaper I’ve really decided to go with a really colorful design, but this time I’m sticking with color. I don’t have the energy to try another wallpaper in this room.
I asked the question about what design I should do on my A2D Facebook page and the majority replied that I should just do the same design with the colorful squares in color. I’m ready for it. As you all know very well, I am not averse to lengthy painting projects. But others suggested that I do something like the stripes I had in the home gym, using colors that would coordinate with the studio’s floral mural.
I like this idea…apparently. But I also don’t like the idea of ​​repeating something I’ve already done. I would like to do something I’ve never done before. I have another idea I’m considering that would be some sort of combination of stripes and squares, but I think I need to spend a bit of time on my computer and make a few mockups before I make my final decision.
So my goal today is to get rid of all my frustration, remove the wallpaper from the walls and repair the walls. And then I’ll take some time and decide which direction I want to go with the walls. The only thing I know for sure is that these walls will have COLOR and lots of paint when I’m done.
