One Room Challenge: Week 3 | Turn Almost Any Wallpaper Into Removable Wallpaper

Are you indecisive? Are you a renter? Have I got a wallpaper hack for you!

Over the last week (week 3 of the One Room Challenge, to be precise), I’ve been hanging regular wallpaper in Benji’s room using starch. That’s right, starch! It’s totally removable and fairly easy to use.

But let me back up. Saying I’ve been working on it for a week makes it sound like this project takes forever and it doesn’t. So far, I’ve probably spent about 5 hours on it and I’m close to done with the accent wall.

In our old apartment, I hung removable (peel and stick) wallpaper on textured walls for Benji’s nursery. That was incredibly difficult/frustrating and it took a LONG time. Plus some of the removable wallpaper panels fell down several times because, you know, textured walls.

This time around has been MUCH easier for a variety of reasons. Though I’ll admit, it’s not QUITE as easy as I imagined it would be.

Let’s walk through the steps of how I’m installing this wallpaper. (I say installing because as this publishes, I’m about 1-2 hours shy of being finished but Benji is asleep in there, so I’ve got to wait until tomorrow to wrap it all up.)

First, I ordered a sample and used some starch to put it up in Benji’s closet, just to make sure that it would stay up (I did it in the closet so he wouldn’t fixate on a strange patch of pattern in his room). It was easy to do and it easily stayed up. I probably should have taken it down a few days later to make sure that it didn’t damage the walls, but I decided to take other bloggers’ words for it that it would work.

This is probably a good place to mention that you’re wallpaper has to be UNPASTED, that’s really important because otherwise you’re just ordering wallpaper with wallpaper glue on the back.

After the experiment, I measured the accent wall I was using about 15 times to make sure I had the dimensions correct before investing in the incredible Bellewood wallpaper by Rebel Walls.

A word on this wallpaper. I really wanted to do something people hadn’t seen before, and Emily Henderson famously used this in her daughter’s nursery. But nothing I found was quite as good, so I decided to use it even though it wasn’t completely original. And I’m so glad I did, it looks incredible and I’d rather pick something I love (and that Benji loves) than something that’s different for the sake of being different.

Rebel Walls custom prints their non-repeating wallpaper to the size of your wall. The pattern is printed on one LONG roll, with labels and lines to show you where to cut and in what order to hang the paper.

When it arrived, it was hard for me to fight my instinct to dive in and start hanging immediately, but I’m so glad I did because this is not a cheap investment and I’m trying to do it right.

I took my time cutting the wallpaper panels up before re-rolling them for installation the following day.

After hanging several panels, I think I figured out the best way to hang long panels so that you can line them up and so that your starch won’t dry before you’ve had a chance to adhere the panel to the whole wall.

INSTALLATION/HANGING:

1 Remove any outlet covers and set them aside.

2. Hang the wallpaper panel up using a few small strips of painters tape behind the top 1/4 - 1/3 of the panel.

3. Align the panel either to the wall or matching the pattern on the other panels, adjusting the painters tape as necessary.

4. Use a level to make sure that your wallpaper is plumb (vertically level).

5. Because the majority of my pattern was on the bottom 2/3 of the panel, I eventually figured out it that it was best to start adhering there so I could make sure the patterns of the panels lined up. To keep the panel away from the wall while I worked, I hung that bottom portion on the other side of a ladder, like so:

6. Pour a small amount of starch into a roller tray

7. Lightly/quickly dip your paint roller into the tray then roll it off a few times to get rid of the excess starch. (You don’t need/want much. I thought I would need more than a gallon for this project, but I’m not even sure I’ve used 1/4 of a gallon on the whole wall.)

8. Run the roller on the wall (on a larger area than you think you’ll need), and then do the edges with an edging paint brush.

9. Again, work to align the pattern of the wallpaper panel to the previous panel. This is the most important part. Some panels may require overlapping to make the patterns work together, but this one needed the panels to be next to each other, not on top of each other. Not easy, but it does make for a cleaner look at the end.

10. Starting from the center of the panel, use a credit card or brayer (see supplies list) to smooth out air bubbles, working the air out to the sides by starting from the center and smoothing outwards (don’t forget to go up, down, and diagonal, generally trying to push the air out to the sides where it can escape). Don’t spend too much time here as you can come back once you’ve done the next step.

11. Once you’ve got this part of your panel aligned and mostly smoothed, quickly check the rest of the panel to make sure that everything is still lining up without overlap or gapping. If it isn’t pull it up from the wall and start again.

12. Go back to smoothing to make sure you’ve got out all the air bubbles and the panel is fully adhered to the wall.

Baseboards: I found that it was best to take care of the bottom of the panel next, cutting it to align with the baseboard. I’ve got a little video of how I did this below:

13. Pull your ruler down the wallpaper to help smooth it out a little more, then use your x-acto knife either above or below the ruler to cut the paper. I found the I could pull the x-acto and the ruler together very slowly across the baseboard and that could help me get that nice smooth line. I will say that it’s easier to cut the paper when the glue is dry, but at the same time, you’re trying to get things adhered so they don’t fall.

14. At this point, your starch may have dried without fully adhering the bottom of the panel to the wall. If that happens, just pull it away from the wall a bit and use your paint brush to paint on some more starch. Now smooth the panel on the wall just like you did earlier.

15. If you accidentally cut your panel too high/low: Save that piece of wallpaper that you needed to be on the wall and adhere it by dipping your finger in the starch and rubbing it on the back of that piece. Align the pattern as best as you can and let it dry in place a little bit before trying to cut again. The smaller the piece, the more it moves around on you while you try to work with it.

16. Before you move to finish the top of your panel, you want to make sure that the part you’ve already done has dried a bit (at least if you’re doing bottom to top like I had to do). Once it has, gently pull the top part of the panel away from the wall and remove the painters tape. If your panel starts falling away from the wall where you’ve already starched it, stop what you’re doing and put the top of the panel back up, smoothing out the air bubbles, and wait for the bottom portion to dry a little more.

17. Repeat steps 7-12.

18. Because I was working with extra paper at the top of my panels, I used painters tape to keep it attached to the ceiling while the top dried.

19. Papering over windows and outlets: Go ahead and install the paper over outlets (with the faceplates removed), then carefully feel around for where there’s no wall behind the paper and cut as close to the wall as you can, preferably using that ruler to help you keep straight lines. For the majority of the windows, I cut the panels, but for the panels on either end of the window, I papered right over it. My plan is to paper the interior sides of our deep window boxes, but I’m having a little trouble on this part, so I’ll update this section once I’ve got it all figured out and completed tomorrow.

WARNINGS:

If you get any starch on the front of your wallpaper, immediately wipe it away with a clean dry cloth. I read about something called a wallpaper sponge that you can also use dampen and use, but I didn’t have one of those.

Don’t use too much starch. If you do, it will over-wet the paper (potentially damaging it) and could end up sticking so much to the wall that it will pull the paint off the wall when you try to remove the paper.

This happened to me when I tried to gently pull off part of a panel I hadn’t aligned closely enough. But I had put on WAY too much starch in this area the day before because I kept trying to fix a problem without pulling this whole portion of the panel down and starting over (which I should have done). Only a little piece of paint came off, but it was enough to make me worried that I’d ruin the paper in the process. I’m guessing if I just apply a wet/damp sponge to the panel when it’s time to move, that should soften the starch enough to remove the paper without further damaging the wall.

SUPPLIES:

• X-Acto Knife

• Scissors

• Ruler

• Level

• Liquid Starch

• Low Nap/Pile Paint Roller

• Edging Paint Brush

• Paint Tray

• Handy Paint Pail

• Ladder

• Clean, Lint-Free Cloths

• Brayer

More on the One Room Challenge: Don’t forget to check out the bloggers/designers/DIYers participating in this year’s One Room Challenge, from the featured participants to the guests participants (like me).