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How-To

How to Lay Out Wallpaper

You need to see how level, plumb, and straight your walls are, and decide where your pattern will start and end, for a wallcovering installation to look its best.

By Mike Litchfield
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Before ordering materials, check that walls are plumb and woodwork is plumb and level. Use a long, straight board or a 4-ft. spirit level to check walls for bumps or dips, and mark them with a pencil so you can spot them easily later. You can hang almost any wallcovering type or pattern, but if door or window casings are markedly out of plumb, small patterns make this less obvious than large, loud patterns.

check the trim for plumb and level
Before hanging wallpaper, check the trim for plumb and level. For example, if the crown molding isn’t level, you may need to raise or lower the wallpaper strips so molding doesn’t chop off the top of a prominent pattern.

 

determine exactly where seams will occur
To determine exactly where seams will occur, mark off intervals the same width as your wallpaper.

 

draw a plumb line
After determining your starting point, draw a plumb line to indicate the leading edge of the first strip of wallpaper.

 

Starting and Finishing Points
Because a room’s final strip of wallpaper usually needs to be trimmed narrower to fit, try to end a job where the final strip is inconspicuous. Here, the job begins and ends in a corner.

Starting and finishing points

The starting point for the first strip of wallpaper is determined by the desired finishing point for the last strip. This last strip almost always needs to be cut to fit, disrupting the strip’s full-width pattern. So, avoid hanging the last strip where it will be conspicuous.

A common place to begin is one side of a main doorway. There, you won’t notice a narrower strip when you enter the room. And when you leave the room, you’ll usually be looking through the doorway. The last piece is often a small one placed over a doorway. Another common starting point is an inconspicuous corner.

To determine exactly where wallpaper seams will occur, mark off intervals the same width as your wallpaper. Go around the room, using a ruler or a wrapped roll of wallpaper as your gauge. Try to avoid trimming and pasting very narrow strips of wallpaper in corners; this usually looks terrible, and the pieces don’t adhere well. You may want to move your starting point an inch or two to avoid that inconvenience.

However, if the pattern is conspicuous, you might start layout with a strip centered in a conspicuous part of a wall—over a mantel, over a sofa, or in the middle of a large wall. Choose a visual focal point, and mark off roll-widths from each side of the starting strip until you have determined where the papering will end—preferably in an inconspicuous place.

You may want to center the pattern at a window, if that’s the visual center of the room. With a picture window, the middle of the strip should align with the middle of the window. If there are two windows, the edges of two strips should meet along a centered, plumbed line between them unless the distance between the windows is less than the width of a strip. If the distance is less, center a strip between the windows.

Room Focal Points
Where windows are the focal point of a room, position the wallcovering accordingly. If the window is a large picture window, center the middle of the strip on the middle of the window. If the focal point is two windows, center the edges of the two strips as shown.

 

Previous: Best Practices for Installing Wallpaper Next: Basic Wallpapering Techniques

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Painting

Painting

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