New Wallpaper!

We're on a roll. No sooner had we finished the upstairs baseboards and trim (June) and the door hardware (August), than we got started on wallpapering the hallway.

This is just a short hallway that connects all the upstairs rooms: three bedrooms, one bathroom, and the stairs down to the 2nd floor. It has a skylight in the ceiling, courtesy of some previous owners, and it has a reclaimed stickwork piece set into the wall, courtesy of Yours Truly, circa 2015.

We'd done some minor renovation to this hallway a few years ago, and painted it a neutral peach color. (It had been dark green.) That was fine, but it was kind of a placeholder. We'd always intended to paper it later on, and so, here we are.

Kathy picked out a nice wallpaper pattern that didn't clash with the existing (and very old) wallpaper in the rest of the house. We're not removing any of the old wallpaper (much as we might like to), so any new patterns have to coexist with it. Best of all, the new wallpaper was pre-pasted, so it'll be easy to hang!

You would think. We dunked the first piece in the water trough just like they tell you and... nothing. It's just wet paper. What the...?

Turns out, it wasn't pre-pasted wallpaper after all. It just said so on the label. We tried another piece from a different roll, thinking maybe it was just a manufacturing error. No joy.

March down to the wallpaper store (conveniently located just a few blocks away) to say, politely, wassup? They were very nice and gave us all the free wallpaper paste we needed to finish the job. Back home to try again.

Pasting wallpaper is messy work, but we managed to finish the job in one day. It's a small hallway, but every single piece had to be measured, cut, and trimmed to fit around some obstacle or other. A doorway here, a sloped ceiling there. And none of the walls are perfectly straight or smooth, of course. But between us I think we did a pretty good job.