How to Apply Peel and Stick Wallpaper: Week 3 One Room Challenge

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Week three of the One Room Challenge presented by Better Homes & Gardens is here and this week I am tackling peel and stick wallpaper to create an accent wall. To give you a recap so far you can check out my previous posts:

• Laundry Room Inspiration for the One Room Challenge
• One Room Challenge: Week 2

Last week was all about painting the walls and giving the room a fresh new color that tied in well with the wallpaper I chose. So let’s go through how to apply peel and stick wallpaper.

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As I mentioned above I chose my wallpaper design from Wallpops. There are many different companies that do peel and stick wallpaper these days. And picking out a pattern was one of the hardest things to pick for this room. But this one won out because it would blend nicely with the wall color and because of price. Some of the options I loved at other companies would have been over $200 and I wasn’t willing to put that much of my budget into the accent wall. I also chose peel and stick over traditional wallpaper due to price and ease of installation. There are so many high quality peel and stick options to pick from these days and I didn’t want to deal with a paste mess.

Now I will be the first to admit that this is the first time I have installed wallpaper of any kind. When we first moved in I was ready to remove all the wallpaper. But again as I mentioned the options for removable wallpaper are so great now that I couldn’t resist. And for some reason I have always had a vision of this wall being an accent wall.

Let’s get to the installation. Now I am not going to say that this project was super easy as there were definitely frustrating times but the end result was all worth it.

The instructions on the wallpaper roll says that your wall should be flat. Well this was my first hurdle as our entire house has textured walls. In fact all the houses I’ve ever lived in have textured walls. So in order to make sure that the wallpaper would adhere to the wall I sanded down the texture using my orbital sander and then for the small spots between the window and the door I used a multi tool with a sanding disc attachment.

I also had to sand off the wall texture when I painted the chalkboard wall in the kitchen, because I didn’t want all the texture bumps when we were trying to write or draw on the chalkboard.

I used an 80 grit sand paper on the wall and just sanded as much as I could and then I would just kind of rub my hand over the area to see if it needed more sanding. After sanding the next step was cleaning and prepping the wall. The surface should be very clean so that the wallpaper will stick because otherwise there will be problems. I wiped down the wall with just a water and rag to first wipe all the dust from sanding, and then I also went back and did a second wash with this tsp like cleaner. Just be aware that sanding will create a big mess.

Now that the wall was clean I could get to the actual installation. The directions included say that you should start by measuring the width of your roll (mine was 16″) from the edge of your wall and then use a level to draw a line that you will line your first roll on.

The reason for this is that if your wall is uneven (and in our old farmhouse that is very true) and if you started on the corner then all your pieces would be uneven as you go on.

Once I lined up the first pass I started at the top and unrolled about a 12″ section at a time. Now because this wall has the window and door I did have to deal with going around these. Once I got to the window edge and had used my Cricut edge to smooth down the paper I used the X-acto knife to cut next to the trim. I think this is what caused the most frustration because there was so many cuts that had to be made while also making sure the paper laid even.

The first run of paper took the longest but once I figured this out and matched the pattern with the next run it became a little more manageable. There was a section near the door where the design did not end up matching exactly below the window but it is only noticeable up close.

Having some type of scraping tool is really essential as this helps you get the paper smooth and pressed into the wall and the corners. I just used my Cricut scraper that I already had.

Once I got the first couple of panels hung and became use to how the wallpaper hung the rest went up pretty smoothly. If you want to see behind the scenes and video of the process head over to my Instagram to check it out.

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