Use The Wallpaper! (My Tips For Wallpaper Installation)

I remember that our tiny little condo had wallpaper like that, and rather than attempting to remove the wallpaper, I ended up using my sander on the walls to remove all of the lifted edges, and then drywall mudding over the uneven areas, sanding the mud, and then priming and painting the walls. There was no way I was going to spend a week or two trying to get that wallpaper, which had probably been installed in the 70s, completely off of the walls. You can see my whole process here.

But wallpapers today are very different. Most of them don’t come pre-pasted anymore, so you can choose your own wallpaper adhesive. And the ones that do come pre-pasted today are very easy to remove when you’re ready to redecorate.

I am a huge proponent of wallpaper. I think a wallpaper or mural can make a whole room. It can take a room from “pretty” to “WOW!” When anyone walks into our bathroom, the mural is almost always the first thing they comment on. I think our bathroom would be pretty without it, but it would be a bit plain. The mural takes it to the next level. This is the Sparkling Garden mural from Photowall.

I feel the same way about our bedroom. I would still be pleased with our bedroom had I just painted the walls a solid teal. But there’s something about the grasscloth, but there’s something about the grasscloth that bumps it up a notch and makes it look more “designer”, for lack of a better word.

The walls in our bedroom suite are also the first thing that people comment on when they see the space. It’s a look that can’t really be achieved with paint, and it makes the whole area feel so much more special.

And of course, my walk-in closet just wouldn’t be the same without the wallpaper. This is the Taylor wallpaper from Jupiter10.

And now I have this gorgeous mural in the entryway. I liked this wall before, but there’s just something magical about the impact that a wall mural can make in a room that you can’t really achieve with a painted wall. This is the Paradise Tropical Floral mural from Anthropologie (affiliate link).

And, of course, the mural in my studio is the star of the room. I can’t imagine this room without it.

Of course, if you’re really scared of wallpaper, or you have a room where wallpaper just won’t work (and there are some rooms like that, which I’ll show you in a minute), you can always just use paint to achieve a wallpaper look. That’s what I did in my studio bathroom. But for most of us, when it comes to achieving a wallpaper look with paint, we’re pretty limited by our artistic ability. Most of us are limited to designs that can be achieved with painters tape, like I did in the studio bathroom. And that limits us to linear designs.

And then, of course, there’s always the option of using a stencil, which is what I did in our music room. But even then, the design possibilities that you can achieve with a stencil are pretty limited compared to the hundreds of thousands of wallpaper options that are available.

Our music room was my only experience using a stencil on walls, and I can tell you, I found it to be much more challenging than installing wallpaper. After that stenciling experience, if given the option between a stencil and wallpaper, I’d choose wallpaper every single time without question.

Of course, there are rooms where I wouldn’t use wallpaper. For example, our breakfast room, which used to be an outdoor breezeway that a previous owner closed in to make more interior space, seems to always be shifting ever so slightly. That’s partly because our house has a pier-and-beam foundation and the soil in our area is always moving and shifting slightly. But I notice it more in this room than any of the others. You can see the shift in the corners of this room where the paper in the corners (i.e., the paper that is applied before the drywall mud is applied) is shifted and wrinkled.

All of the corners in this room are like that. This is the corner opposite the one above, and it looks the same way. All four corners in this room look this way.

I would never use a wallpaper in this room that wraps around the corners from one wall to the next because eventually, the wallpapered corners would look like that also. That’s a problem with a lot of older homes. But in rooms like this, a wallpaper mural on a feature wall (if there’s one available) is still a viable option. Just make sure the wallpaper starts at one corner and ends and the corner on the opposite end of the wall.

As far as types of wallpapers and adhesives to use, I prefer wallpapers that are NOT pre-pasted. It costs a little more because you often have to purchase adhesive separately (although some companies do provide adhesive with your order, like my bathroom wall mural from Photowall), but I find it so much easier to work with.

When using wallpaper that isn’t pre-pasted, I roll and brush the paste onto the wall and then put the wallpaper up. And if you’re looking for a paste that is easy to apply, easy to remove, and makes wallpaper removal very easy, I highly recommend Roman Pro-880. Just as long as you’re applying your wallpaper to painted drywall and you’ve allowed the paint to fully cure, the wallpaper will come off very easily.

As far as pre-pasted wallpaper, the only kind I’ve used in the last few years is Spoonflower pre-pasted wallpaper. You just use a paint roller to roll water on the back of the paper, give it a couple of minutes to activate the adhesive, and then you can apply the wallpaper. And removal is very easy. When I decided to remove the original wallpaper that I designed for the studio and use a larger version of that wallpaper instead, the original wallpaper came off in whole sheets. It took me about ten minutes to strip the wallpaper from the entire 20-foot wall.

I have people ask me often about peel-and-stick wallpaper, and I don’t like them. I will always choose paste over peel-and-stick. The reason is because I always do my wallpaper projects by myself, and wrestling with large sheets of wallpaper on my own means that I never get the paper on the wall exactly where it needs to go right off the bat. With peel-and-stick wallpaper, you have to remove and attempt again to place it on exactly where it needs to go. That’s much easier if you have someone to help you, but I never do.

With paste, it remains wet and slippery long enough for me to place the wallpaper against the wall and then slide it around a bit until it’s exactly where it needs to be. Of course, I don’t apply the entire sheet of wallpaper and then attempt to slide it because that won’t work. But I get a small section applied (generally lined up against the previous piece), and then can slide it around until it’s exactly right, and then smooth down the rest of the piece.

I am a huge fan of wallpaper. And I think there are so many people who would love to use wallpaper, but they have nightmares about trying to remove the wallpaper in the future. I’ve seen comments from countless people who have sworn off of wallpaper for that one reason alone. So I just want to encourage you that hard-to-remove wallpaper really isn’t an issue anymore. Those days of renting steamers, buying all kinds of scrapers, and trying various chemicals, and even then, only being able to remove tiny pieces at a time, are in the past. So buy that wallpaper! Hang that wallpaper! LOVE that wallpaper! And then have no fear of removing the wallpaper when you’re ready to move on.