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I Tried Hanging Wallpaper for the First Time, Here’s How It Went

Thinking about hanging wallpaper in your home? I’m sharing my experience hanging wallpaper for the first time – hint: it’s not as hard as I’d expected.

Before
After

It’s been more than two years now since I first came across this beautiful wallpaper in the most gorgeous bedroom space designed by one of my favourites, Heidi Caillier. I instantly fell head-over-heels in love with the classic feel of the block print style pattern and natural colours. I filed it away in my saves folder on Instagram (adding every other photo of it since including this one and this one) and, while I had no idea where I might put it to work, I just knew I had to bring it into our home someday.

Fast forward to finally embarking on our first major renovations in this new/old house of ours and, while I may not have had anything else figured out, I knew this was my chance to bring this wallpaper into our old Tudor style home. It took me ages to pull together the design plans for our ensuite, bedroom and closet – humming and hawing over every little decision, but the one thing I did have was a jumping off point with this gorgeous wallpaper.

With our new walls all built out and drywalled, I quickly got to work readying myself to hang some wallpaper. Having never really done this before, I did loads of research – soaking up every tutorial I could get my hands on. I spent hours watching YouTube videos about how to hang wallpaper – where to start, how to pattern match, the best ways to make sure it stays level, what kind of glue to use, how to wrap around interior and exterior corners – and, while I came across several really helpful videos, this playlist was by far my favourite. There are of course, an endless supply of video tutorials out there, but here were some of the videos I found most helpful…

Wallpaper Tutorials:

  1. How to Wallpaper Using a Laser Level
  2. How to Wallpaper into a Corner
  3. How to Wallpaper an Uneven Corner
  4. How to Cut and Interior and Exterior Corner (also shows wallpapering around a bulkhead)
  5. Wallpapering – Hanging that First Length from a Corner
  6. How to Wallpaper around a Window Recess (this was THE BEST video to help me figure out our bay window area!)
  7. How to Wallpaper External Corners Like a Pro

I won’t pretend I’m any sort of professional wallpaper hanger after completing two relatively small rooms, so I’ll leave the tutorials to the pros at this point – but, if you make your way through that playlist, I promise you’ll feel much more ready to take on your next wallpapering job too. After arming myself with all the knowledge I could, I felt so much more confident in my ability to take this job on and do it well enough to do that beautiful wallpaper justice.

I started by first painting out our walls with a colour that would match the background of our wallpaper – a trick to help hide any small gaps in the seams. Once the paint had cured for a few days, I gathered my wallpapering tools and got right to work. It’s important to note that the wallpaper I installed required a paste the wall application, which, from what I read, just so happens to be the easiest and most forgiving of all the application types.

wallpaper tools

Wallpaper tools:

Everything I read said to work from right to left along the walls if you are right handed, which I am – because I was just wallpapering two walls in our closet (the other two will be covered in cabinets), it meant I had to start with the trickier of the walls.

I found the first sheet the easiest to hang as there wasn’t any pattern matching or tricky cuts to worry about. I simply measured out the length of paper I needed (adding an extra 1.5″ to the top and bottom to allow for more precise cutting after install). After coating the wall with a generous layout of paste, I started at the top, overlapping my wallpaper onto the ceiling about 1″ and wrapping it around the corner onto the adjacent wall by about 1″ as well. I lined my laser level up with that top left corner and lined the left side of my paper up with the laser line all the way down the wall – this ensures your paper is “plumb” (level), which is so important to ensure the pattern continues level all around the room. If you first sheet isn’t level, it will show more and more with each new sheet that you hang.

I worked my way down from the ceiling in about 6″ increments, matching up the left hand side first, then smoothing the paper towards the corner as I went, ensuring there were no creases or air bubbles. Once I’d made my way from the top to the bottom, I went over it all with my wallpaper smoothing tool, pushing the paper into the corner. I used my straight edge and utility knife to cut off the extra paper along the ceiling and floor, always cutting on the outside edge (on top of the straight edge along the ceiling, under the straight edge along the floor). There was a bit of a technique to this, particularly in the corners – the YouTube videos I linked to a great job of walking you through all of this.

With that first sheet up, I simply followed the same process all the way around the rest of the space. As I said, the tutorials I linked above will do a better job of walking you through each step along the way better than I ever could (I am certainly no professional and would hate to steer anyone wrong). Once I had the outside and ceiling of my window recess wallpapered, I started work on the inside walls – I followed the process shown in this video to work my way through this recessed window wall (again, Phil does a far better job explaining it all than I ever could). This was definitely a challenging wall to take on right out of the gate, and it was pretty slow going because I really wanted to get it just right. After about 6 hours of work, here’s where I ended up…

Luckily day two moved SO much faster! It took me a couple of hours to finish off that window wall and then just two hours to complete the adjacent wall beside it (turns out flat, boring walls are SO much easier!).

With the closet install behind me, I decided to take on our water closet for day three – the last space I’d planned to wallpaper, but arguably, also the trickiest with it’s sloped ceiling and angled walls everywhere.

I started in the far back corner and worked my way around the room from right to left, just as I had in our closet. I shared a bit of the process over on Instagram, but forgot to grab some photos of this along the way for the blog – here’s a screenshot I stole from Instagram though…

Though smaller, this little room was definitely harder to hang wallpaper around, but I took my time to really get it right (7 hours to be exact) and I couldn’t be happier with the result.

And that’s it my friends! My first foray into wallpapering. I will try to put together some more detailed posts and/or videos about the process soon, but I wanted to share all about my first experience wallpapering while it was still fresh. This really felt like a daunting project before I started, but armed with the right tools and the knowledge I gained from those YouTube videos, I felt confident enough to give it a shot. Seeing this gorgeous wallpaper up on these walls was worth every minute of research, prep and hard work to get it there.

Wishing you SUCH a lovely day!

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