One Room Challenge Week 6
Let’s Talk About Wallpaper
It probably wasn’t my best idea to commit to an eight-week design challenge knowing that I would be away on vacation for two of those weeks. It’s not possible to install a wallpaper mural when you’re riding roller coasters 3,000 miles away!
The Wallsauce-generated image of my mural shows what it will look like when I do finally get it installed.
Still, while I wasn’t physically hanging wallpaper, I did spend at least a little bit of time thinking about wallpaper. We stayed in a short-term rental house that had plenty of examples of wallpaper murals, hung in a variety of ways.
The primary bedroom of our rental house featured a lovely flamingo mural.
The living room had an inexplicable accent wall of faux brick.
A “Star Wars” themed bedroom included a mural of the planet Coruscant.
My primary advice to my interior design clients using wallpaper is this: DO NOT skimp on the installation. While hanging wallpaper is a fairly simple job, it’s very difficult to do perfectly. If you’re spending thousands of dollars on designer wallpaper, you don’t want to take a chance that Joe Handyman is going to install it incorrectly or damage it while putting it up.
So why aren’t I taking my own advice? Why am I planning to hang my own wallpaper with my usual optimism and confidence, even though I’ve never hung wallpaper before?
The simple answer is that I’m not hanging traditional wallpaper. Instead, I’ve selected an inexpensive mural that’s designed for do-it-yourself installation. There are many online companies that offer these customizable murals. I found mine on Wallsauce (Wall Murals & Wallpaper Murals | Wallsauce US). Another company I’ve had experience with is Wallism (Wall Coverings by Wallism 》A creative revolution for your walls). An online search will pull up many others.
Underwater Dream VI mural from Wallsauce.
Here are some of the advantages of these online murals:
There are literally thousands of designs to choose from, in hundreds of categories, and all very reasonably priced. Some companies even allow you to upload your own photo and have it made into a mural. Instead of small-scale repeated patterns, you can select large-scale images that cover an entire wall, or multiple walls, making a dramatic impact.
The murals are customizable to your room, scaled to fit the space. You simply enter the measurements of your wall online, and you can see how the image will fit and where it will need to be cropped. I was even able to send in a photo to receive an image of my mural on the actual wall, so I could see how much of the image would be hidden when the door on the adjacent wall was open – and then to flip the image to better show the design.
This example shows how you’re able to customize the mural to best fit your wall’s full dimensions. You select which parts of the design to cut off when you place the order, and it arrives in panels scaled to your specifications.
Unlike traditional wallpapers, these are designed for easy DIY installation. Instead of pasting the back of the wallpaper, you simply apply the paste onto the wall with a roller and position each numbered panel of the mural into place, one by one. The panels are designed to butt up next to each other, with no need to cut away any overlap.
Having trouble deciding on a design? You can order samples to get the best idea of colors and patterns.
Vintage Lush, from Wallism.
You can also select different materials, including heavy-duty premium papers that are scratch-, tear-, and stain-resistant for high-traffic areas. Many companies’ papers are PVC-free, printed using environmentally friendly inks, fire-rated, washable, and UV resistant so they don’t fade.
Most companies also offer peel-and-stick removable vinyl wallpapers These are self-adhesive and don’t require wallpaper paste. However, I would recommend them only if you live in a rented home and will need to be able to easily peel them off the wall, as they’re cheaper-looking and a little more difficult to install.
Pumpkin Poppies I, from Wallism.
Okay, enough talking about wallpaper. It’s time to head home and get back to work! Our little Disney vacation has put me even further behind my One Room Challenge schedule, but I will get the project finished eventually, and will continue posting my progress here and on my Instagram (@cancaninteriors) and Facebook (CanCan Interiors) pages.
Also continue following along on the ONE ROOM CHALLENGE® website and @oneroomchallenge. My links should get on there eventually, and you can also see the ambitious and creative projects being done by other One Room Challenge participants. Unlike me, many of them are actually getting their projects completed on time!
