the papered hall

Why is it that pregnant women come up with the most insane ideas? About two years ago, when I was six months pregnant with my son, I decided it would be the perfect time for my husband and I to try our hand at wallpapering our hallway. There were two inherent flaws in this plan (three if you count the fact that my belly was protruding about six inches from my body): 1) neither one of us had ever hung wallpaper and 2) our hallway is about four feet wide with irregular walls and no surrounding space for a "work" area. However, you cannot deter a pregnant woman with a plan, so the wallpaper was ordered and thus began the blowup of 2008.

While I'd like to take credit for coming up with the wallpapering idea all on my own, I was actually inspired by a feature in the now defunct Domino magazine (sigh!). The article led me to Walnut Wallpaper where I found this amazing print, Kimura, by Romo. I was ecstatic to have a new project; my husband rolled his eyes. With the paper on its way to Charlotte, NC from England, we purchased the remaining supplies necessary--glue, roller, seam something-or-other--and waited for the excitement to begin.

One word of advice I have to offer while ordering wallpaper is to take advantage of "asking the experts." I asked the experts, but I didn't listen to them. Similar to fabrics, wallpaper comes in different repeats and widths and are packaged in single, double or even triple rolls (whatever that means). If you give the "experts" the measurements of the walls you want to cover, they'll let you know how many rolls to order. The half-assed measurements I provided equated to at least two rolls of wallpaper for my project. I ordered one. After a (long) day of intense hanging and several you drive me crazies, we were left with about a dozen scraps of unusable paper, two headaches and only one wall fully covered. I ordered another roll; we waited the three weeks that it took to arrive from England and repeated the process.

Although there are too many flaws to count--patches of wallpaper stuck to the baseboards, uneven alignment and even a patch hung upside down (see pictures below for the correct orientation versus upside down)--I was proud that my husband and I completed it on our own. Actually, "completed" might be too strong a word since we ran out of paper a second time and decided to paint the remaining wall the color of the paper's background instead of waiting for yet another roll.

Although the wallpaper hanging didn't go as smoothly as outlined in the magazine, it's actually turned out to be one of my favorite projects. If my husband is willing to undertake another such adventure with me, I promise to listen to the experts and choose a big, blank wall free of windows and doors (with plenty of surrounding workspace) next time.