Ah, the day has finally come to where my husband finally let me put wallpaper somewhere in our house! He doesn’t believe that it’s totally cool now and well you guys, let me tell you what I told my husband, wallpaper is only outdated if you make it look outdated. In this case, a peel and stick wallpaper can never be outdated because guess what — it comes off even better than stickers! So feel free to change your mind about a few couple hundred times to refresh the room… okay kidding, it ain’t that easy to apply it! It requires lots of patience and a few hours or so of your time. But nonetheless, watch the video and read below to find out exactly how we applied peel and stick wallpaper for the first time ever ON TEXTURED WALLS!
Funny story…my husband was ready to mud the walls or scrape the texture off in the laundry to apply the wallpaper but I told him that was totally unnecessary! He didn’t believe me at first but that was the whole point of me ordering the peel and stick wallpaper, so that we wouldn’t have to do all that work. And well, the wife is always right because the application process went better than expected (other than the wallpaper separating but I guess we can’t have everything), just check it out below to see for yourself!
PRESS PLAY:
https://honestlydesignedinteriors.com/wp-content/uploads/Video-Aug-16-8-56-32-PM.mov
These are how our walls are textured! And we had no problem placing on the peel and stick wallpaper. So far it has help up really well except for the wallpaper shrinking in some spots after a week. We haven’t figured out why it did that, maybe because we “stretched” out the wallpaper with a squeegee too much? But we fixed it and don’t seem to have any issues thus far!
1. Measure
- Measure the square footage of your wall space like 3x before ordering wallpaper and then add some to that! Reason being, you might mess up plus you need a little excess sticking out while applying so that when you go to trim the edges, everything is nice and straight and the designs match up! Or in like our case, our wallpaper separated a little between some pieces so we had to place it back together and add a sliver of wallpaper on top, towards the ceiling where it’d be less noticeable. Because somehow it shrank? Dunno how tbh but it happened.
- Ok, that’s said, so now when you go to apply, in order to cut the piece to correct size, measure the first wall space you’ll be covering — measure vertically if applying wallpaper vertically or measure horizontally if applying horizontally (like we did)
- measure to where the WALL SPACE ENDS, even if a cabinet is in the way but there is still wallspace underneath or above it (refer to video to understand better at 2:11)
- you’ll just have to cut around the cabinet or whatnot but need to make sure that it’s all one piece and not a bunch of little pieces — I say this now so that you could cut to correct size
2. Cut, Flip, and Roll
- when you cut wallpaper on a large flat surface, make sure you cut with the design face down and cut against something hard like a yardstick or wood board to ensure everything is straight as can be
- you then flip it around (shown in video at 0:08) and roll it up long ways so that you only see the white backside, this makes for easier application process as you slowly unpeel and stick
3. Unpeel, Stick, and Squeegee
- go over the wall where you will be applying wallpaper with a scraper to get rid of any loose texture or paint or whatnot
- have someone help you unless you are a great multi-tasker and can unpeel and stick on and squeegee and hold onto the roll all at the same time
- I suggest starting at the bottom with your biggest wall space and going towards the ceiling because well, uneven ceilings are way to common
- unpeel a little at a time but not too little or else your patience will end — applying wallpaper takes some time, especially if it’s a tedious design
- stick and squeegee as you go — if you don’t have a squeegee, you can use a scraper and place a few layers of painters tape on the edge so that it doesn’t rip through the wallpaper
- keep going piece by piece, making sure that the designs match up as you keep adding wallpaper and making sure they’re as close as possible
- don’t be scared to unstick a little and try again if you end up with too many bubbles or if designs don’t match up (refer to video at 3:40)
- when cutting around something, always leave a little excess wallpaper hanging so that all designs are even
- if you come across a switch or outlet, loosen the cover so that the wallpaper just slides behind the cover a little
4. Trim Edges
- and now using a blade or an X-acto knife, cut off all the excess wallpaper
5. If Wallpaper Shrinks or Separates Overtime
- well who would’ve thought that wallpaper can shrink, but ours did — I noticed wall spacing between some pieces of wallpaper about a week after we applied the wallpaper
- I didn’t find any resources online on why this happened but all we did to fix it was unstick the wallpaper and place it back on so that there was no more spacing (nor bubbles)
- luckily, we still have some wallpaper left over so we used to add to the top of the wall because we had to unstick and bring the wallpaper down to get rid of that spacing
- peel and stick wallpaper is easy to work with and fix but also tedious because it is sticky — so be careful when fixing/ reapplying or you might crinkle and ruin the wallpaper piece
This is our first time ever using a peel and stick wallpaper — well, any kind of wallpaper really! My husband said applying it gave him a headache but mostly because the design has so many tiny lines in it that he had to align closely! And I believe it took a good 5 hours, so I understand why his head would hurt! But it’s okay, because I am SO HAPPY with it and if I’m happy, he’s happy! Heh. Yes, it wasn’t my first choice (read what happened and why I chose this wallpaper here) and yes, it took a million days to convince my husband that wallpaper is totally cool now, BUT WHO CARES NOW BECAUSE I LOVE IT! And if I every change my mind (because every wanna-be designer changes their mind a million plus one times) it’s totally easy to remove! Basically it’s better than stickers, I can never get those darn things off of anything! But this wallpaper was totally worth the extra hundred bucks or so (which is totally a good price) to transform our laundry space! Check out the photos here and the how to and sources here!
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