One Room Challenge Week 7-ish
At Long Last, Wallpaper!
I’m calling this Week 7-ish, but in reality, we’re into about Week 12 or 13 of the Fall 2025 One Room Challenge. I have continued working on the room since we returned from our two-week vacation, but the holidays and the demands of my real job have definitely slowed my progress.
I originally scheduled hanging the wallpaper for Week 5, so it was nice to finally get it up!
Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve been up to:
I removed the old wire shelving from the closet, filled in the gigantic holes left behind, and painted the interior in a neutral shade of white. Next on my to-do list is to assemble
and install the new closet shelving, to transform the little closet into my dream gift-wrap closet.
Those ugly wire shelves leave such massive holes in the drywall!
With the holes filled, it was time for closet paint.
Despite the bright colors in the room, the closet is a neutral white.
I did a little touch-up painting on the walls and ceiling, getting all of the edges perfectly straight and filling in little imperfections.
I painted a wallpaper sizing primer on the mural wall. If you’re not familiar with this product, I highly recommend it as a part of any wallpaper prep. It’s designed to create a
barrier between the wall and the wallpaper, which has two main advantages: First, it keeps the wallpaper paste from absorbing into the wall, to ensure that the paste spreads
evenly and the wallpaper hangs smoothly. Second, it will theoretically make it easier to remove the wallpaper if and when the time comes, without damaging the drywall.
My next task should have been hanging the wallpaper, but instead I encountered another setback: When I painted the sizing on the wall, I taped off the surrounding walls and ceiling.
Unfortunately, when I went to remove the tape from the ceiling, it pulled my glossy paint off with it. I thought I could just sand the edges where the paint peeled away, and repaint just that edge, but the more I tried to sand it smooth, the more the paint peeled away, pulling off like big strips of plastic.
Painting the primer for the wallpaper (attempt #1).
The ceiling disaster.
Beginning again, with new ceiling primer and paint.
So much of the paint peeled away that I considered just stripping the whole ceiling and repainting it with regular paint, but I realized that would mean even more work. So I just peeled it until I could get a smooth sanded edge, then repainted a huge chunk of the ceiling, primer and all. (I won’t even get into how I fell off the ladder while I was repainting the ceiling, and had to take a trip to the urgent care center.)
What a disaster! That glossy ceiling is now officially the bane of my existence. I thought it would be fun. It has not been fun.
To ensure the wallpaper panels went on straight, I first measured and marked off the width of each panel in a few spots along the wall …
… then marked off a vertical chalk line to follow. After a few panels, I no longer needed the chalk line.
The wallpaper is designed for the paste to be applied directly to the wall, not to the back of the paper. Easy-peasy!
After all of that, installing the wallpaper mural was actually a pleasure. As advertised, the panels were simple to install, and went up fairly quickly. Finally some progress!
Here are the first few panels in place, not yet trimmed along the edges.
Keep following for the final reveal!
I won’t show the finished mural just yet, but keep following along. I promise I will have a final reveal sometime in the not-too-distant future! Watch for it here on the CanCan Interiors website, on our Instagram (@cancaninteriors), and on Facebook (CanCan Interiors).
And if you’ve been following along on the One Room Challenge website, you can see all the final reveals from the intrepid participants who actually managed to get their projects completed. Here are the Week 8 posts: Fall 2025 - Week 8 (The Reveals!) — ONE ROOM CHALLENGE®. I’m planning to have my final reveal linked retroactively to the site once I finally get it posted. Hopefully it will be before the Spring 2026 One Room Challenge begins!
