Powder Room Reno Pt. 3: Installing Removable Wallpaper

Thursday, July 18, 2019



I know I'm dragging out these powder room posts, but there really is so much to cover! In this post, I'll be going in depth about the wallpaper we chose for our bathroom, how we installed it, and my honest opinions on the product and process! It's juicy. Er, as juicy as wallpaper can be.

When I walked in the door after 10 days away in Nova Scotia, the first thing I saw when I walked in the back door was my wallpapered bathroom. In that moment, I honestly wanted to kiss my house right on the mouth. Being away for 10 days really made me appreciate how far we have come with this home, AND with this particular project. I'm just so excited with how it turned out and can't wait to walk you through it.

I have been seeing all over the internet that wallpaper is reaaaally having a comeback. It's no longer just for Grandma's house. It's chic, it's punchy, and it can add so much visual interest to an otherwise boring room.

I knew I wanted to do a wallpaper pattern on this powder room ever since we moved here. Something about the angled wall under the stairs just screamed "accent wall" to me and I knew it had to be more than paint. I was super, super inspired by this beautiful laundry room wall by Jenna Sue Design.


I absolutely loved the soft pattern of the wallpaper and the visual interest it added to a typically uninteresting room. I figured if she could do it in laundry, why couldn't I do it in my powder room?  We have an air vent in this bathroom that helps cool our entire first floor, so we are typically leaving the bathroom door wide open. Since it's going to be open most of the time, I might as well make it beautiful, right?

Since we've never installed wallpaper before, I was nervous to commit to full on glue. I have a theory now that glue wallpaper is actually EASIER to work with than the removable kind, but I'll get to that in a bit. I started hunting for a pattern similar to the Jenna Sue room and found one I really liked on WallsNeedLove.com. Our pattern is called Ida, if you're wanting to shop it!



When it came to measuring the wall to order the wallpaper rolls, I genuinely thought I did it right. I measured the height, the width, added 15% for overage in case we needed to make weird cuts (we did). And yet, somehow, we still ran short. I am notoriously bad at math, but I do think something was a little funky with how much this covered. It was a repeating pattern, and because of our angles we had to line them up in weird ways. Maybe I didn't account for that? Either way, I was several square feet short. My best advice here is to order more than you think you need, measure 3x, and don't ask me to do math, ever.



Thankfully, WallsNeedLove had awesome customer service and my extra panel arrived in 2 days! I was able to cut parts of the print to fit in the spaces we needed and fill in our gaps. You can hardly tell there are even seams unless you look really closely.

I will say, installing removable wallpaper can be a little tricky. There were some moments we got really, really frustrated because it kept sticking to itself, or the wall, or us, and it made the process take a lot longer than I think it should have. You know when you're trying to wrap something in Saran Wrap and it sticks to itself as you're stretching it out and then you have to throw the whole thing away? This kept happening to us. It was just always sticking to itself or to the wall and we kept having to stop and fix it. It slowed us down for sure and caused us to have to pause and re-set, re-position, and constantly smooth out air bubbles.

 

If we were to add wallpaper again, I am pretty confident in saying I would choose regular glue wall paper. I had a great experience using the Walls Need Love product, but I think you have a bit more flexibility with installation since it doesn't stick to itself and can be adjusted once it's laid on the wall. Lining up the pattern was also frustrating, and required a reaaaally steady hand since our pattern had so many lines. We would spent several minutes making sure one area was perfectly in line, only to step back and realize it was off in another. It just required a lot of stopping, re-starting, removing, re-applying, and so on until we got it exactly right. At one point we asked ourselves if it was worth continuing and should we just scrap the whole project, but thankfully we didn't give up! Now that it's finished, you really can't see the seams and I'm glad we spent the time making sure it looked perfect.







My best before of this angle was from before I started blogging and was just documenting on Instagram, so apologies for the caption. But wow, what a change!




This bathroom is legitimately my favorite room in our house. It feels like the most "me" project I've ever undertaken and I am so glad I decided to do the wallpaper, even if it was a P.I.T.A.!  Now that I see how great it can look, you better believe I'll be doing it again in another project! 10/10 would wallpaper again!






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