The wallpaper arrived! Thank you Mr. Mail Man! Although the ceiling is now smooth, I noticed the edges had a little variation so I spent Thursday night skim coating the edges (where the ceiling hits the walls) and then woke up Friday morning and sanded.
With the ceiling 100% ready to go, I was eager to get the wallpaper up. I watched some youtube videos and read some blogs about tips for hanging peel and stick wallpaper and everything clearly said this is a 2 person job! With Cody out of town, I recruited one of my best friends to help me hang it. I’d like to note that you know you have a good friend if they’re willing to help you hang wallpaper because it was not easy or necessarily fun to crank your neck to stare at the ceiling for hours.
I saw a method to measure the width of your wallpaper roll and mark it on the ceiling. I started against the back wall and measured out 24 inches and drew a line parallel with the wall to mark “tracks” for the first roll. Once we got up there we realized how challenging it was to be under the paper and apply it on lines that we couldn’t see lol. I think this method would be great for normal wallpaper application (on a wall) but on the ceiling, it didn’t do us any good. But with this being the first roll, we used the wall as a guide and was able to get the 12 foot roll up in about an hour.
The second roll proved to be a lot more challenging as lining up the pattern seems easy in theory but is a lot easier said than done. Beginning the second roll was a 30-minute fiasco in itself. If you follow me on Instagram, you probably saw the “circus act” of ladder flipping that we did to try to figure out the best angle to approach the task. I finally got the wallpaper aligned with the 3/4 inch overlap as the directions stated but as we progressed down the wall, it became clear that we were moving at the slightest angle because the 3/4 inch gap went to 1/2 inch, then 1/4 inch and by the end was barely there at all. We went back and forth pulling up the paper, trying to straighten it but after many failed attempts (plus a cranked neck from staring at the ceiling and my pregnant joints giving out) I shocked this roll up to “good enough.”
I HATE that is how I had to end things but after leaving the room and coming back in to view it again, we couldn’t even see the errors! I think when you’re on a ladder and your task is the overlap, the mistakes are a lot more obvious. When you’re a “spectator” on the ground, it’s almost impossible to find the mistakes! Check out the progress pic below and let me know what you guys think!
Given that the gap disappeared, I have to assume this roll isn’t straight and is maybe sitting at a 1-degree angle. But to the naked eye, looks perfectly straight. And even to an eye on a ladder looking for the error, it still looks perfectly straight! The other theory I have is that the wall itself is not perfectly straight so since we are following the wall, we could have the 3/4 inch variation from unevenly hung sheetrock. I mean my self-esteem would like to blame it on the wall being uneven lol, but in reality, it’s probably my/our hanging skills that caused this.
Going forward, I plan to hang the remainder of the 4 rolls in line with this roll. I would rather keep the pattern going consistently. Like I said it isn’t noticeably crooked AT ALL so going in line with this roll seems the most logical.
In other news, a lot of the items I have ordered for the room have begun to arrive! Our front entryway has turned into a storage unit with a crib, rug, rug pad, curtain rod, hanging chair, and more. If you look in the windows at night, we most definitely look like hoarders but the entry hallway is like the one area of the house that we don’t use (we mostly enter through our garage) so it seemed like the most “out of the way” place to store everything.
Well, that is the week 4 update. I am about to head out for some memorial day fun and I hope you’re doing the same! If you want to check out the other participant’s updates, head to www.oneroomchallenge.com/orc-blog
[…] check out the Week 2 and Week 3 blog posts. And for the wallpaper application posts, check out Week 4 and Week 5 blog posts. (You’re probably reading this right now thinking 4 weeks worth of […]