Wallpaper Process - Ups & Downs

The wallpaper arrived the other day which was exciting. Less exciting was the fact that as we tried to put it up on the wall it simply wouldn't stick to the walls!

One really annoying thing about this house is that most walls are textured. It's not a terribly heavy texture, but it's there nonetheless... Who every thought of such a ridiculous idea as texturing walls? We think from a couple of factors that this was a pretty recent change the previous owners made as they were remodeling the house. And I just have to say to anybody contemplating putting texture up on their walls: don't! It might be easy to put up, however it certainly isn't easy to take down (so much hassle it's not even worth the project). 

So anyway, we're dealing with textured walls, I had bought wallpaper paste for pre-pasted wallpaper, because that's what I had ordered. We first sized the wall with some acrylic product the people at the paint store recommended to us, to make the paper adhere better, and then we tried to put the paper up. Well it just wouldn't stay up.

After several tries we decided to try to sand the wall down with our palm sander to remove some of the texture (thereby getting a fine layer of dust everywhere which was a bit annoying). Then we cleaned the wall, re-applied the sizing, went to our favorite store Home Depot and bought some extra adhesive wallpaper paste, and tried the whole process again the next day.

Well, this time it did stick. The whole process went really well, that is up to the very last part of the wall when we ran out of paper. Completely annoying. Especially since you have to order this stuff, so it won't come for a week or two.

So now we have wallpaper on most of the wall, with a strip missing. But it's looking good, I'm very satisfied with my choice of paper, and tomorrow we're going to do the final trimming around the arch to get a really nice and tight fit. 

trimming around the moulding

almost complete - except the missing strip, and the final trimming to be done around the arch (plus the ugly heater which needs to get painted to blend in somewhat)