Here I showed you Part I of my laundry area redo. Here’s what happened next.
After painting and putting up the chair rail., I was ready to start my wallpapering.
After much research on what type/brand of wallpaper to get, I got a paintable, pre-pasted “beadboard-look” wallpaper that had glowing online reviews. I won’t name the brand here because it turned out to be such a miserable failure (for me).
All the wallpapering tutorials I found online emphasized to follow the directions on the label for booking. Booking is the step after dipping the paper in water, where you fold it over onto itself and let the water soak into the paste. Well. Lucky me! MY wallpaper’s directions didn’t even MENTION booking. Fabulous. So I followed the directions perfectly by dipping a test strip in water for the right amount of time and then putting it immediately up on the wall.
Holey buckets of wallpaper paste, Batman!
It was a huge mess! The paste was dripping everywhere and making puddles on the the floor at the baseboards. But I got the paper up, straightened, smoothed, and trimmed. (I should also mention that I prepped the wall according to online tutorials as well, and rolled on a recommended thin coat of paste for extra sticking power.)
The next morning, the paper was peeling off the wall. I ripped it down and decided to book the next test strip for the so-called “average” amount of time I found online, which is 5 minutes.
Next test strip was dipped, booked, and put up. It looked great and it was staying in place!
Heartened, I kept going and finished up the wallpapering.
Meanwhile, Nick noticed the outside edges were picking up a little, so he was very thoughtful and put some tape on them to hold them down while they dried. (don’t.do.this! we found out later)
Later that night:
ARGHHHH!!!!
I handled it very well. I pulled off the couple pieces that were gapping and I redid them. I even put extra paste on the wall.
Later on, when everything was dry, other edges AND edges of the new strips were all picking up as well. Plus, when I took off the tape holding the edges down, it (of course) ripped the edges in a few spots. I had to come up with Plan B. SO FRUSTRATING! grrrrrrrrr.
Hubby felt sorry for me so he went with me (yay!) to the store to look at what real beadboard is like and see if we could salvage the project. We ended up finding bead board paneling that is pre-painted and it’s only 3/16” thick. With baseboards that stick out 5/16”, this meant we wouldn’t have to remove them.
We bought a bunch of supplies (like a new saw blade and saw horses) because now we really would have to bust out the power saw that neither of us had ever used. Our saw is a Skil saw from the 70’s or so, (judging by its groovy mustard color.) It was very thoughtfully loaned to us by my mom when we moved into our house. She thought we might need it for something, so “here you go you can hang onto this for awhile.” Boy. She was right. Must be Mom-E.S.P.
I’ll tell you all about our adventures with bead board paneling in my next post, and I’ll show you the FINAL result! (Which is a happy ending after all of this!)
Thanks for reading!
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