In which I unexpectedly wallpaper

I have wallpapered exactly once in my life, when I did the kitchen in our old house about 10 years ago, and I didn't enjoy it. When I finished I got rid of all the equipment and vowed that paint was the only way in the future. When we renovated 5 years ago I was really keen to do something on one of the walls of the laundry, which is otherwise a rather plain room. 

 

I planned to do some sort of colourful geometric stencil, but it just never happened. To be honest I just didn't feel like acquiring a new skill! I did actually consider wallpaper but a whole roll for just over 3m² seemed a bit much. When Photowall got in touch to see if I'd be interested in trying out one of their custom printed products I was initially "oh god, wallpaper!" but I had a look at the website and got sucked into their seemingly never-ending options and really liked quite a few of them. My husband thought I was mad (for both wallpapering AND wallpapering a laundry) but we agreed on a couple possibilities. The first one we wanted was called 'Tangled Jungle' because it reminded us of old 19thC prints of Polynesia that were popular back in the 1960s. I mean, how great would a laundry look with this on the wall?

But when I put in the dimensions of the wall itself it was quite obvious that it just wasn't the image for us, proportion-wise. You can shift the window around on the image but even so it was such a small amount of it it would kind of ruin the overall effect. I'm really glad they have this function because otherwise I'd have been pretty disappointed when it arrived! If I ever get a wall this shape though...

I started looking for patterns that would better accommodate the almost square shape of the wall and found 'Circles Mid-century II'. 

We've decorated our house fairly solidly mid-century and the colours fit too and amazingly when I put in the dimensions the middle three panels fit perfectly! It was clearly meant to be.

 Once I made the decision the wallpaper arrived in less than a week - from Sweden. During Covid. Globalisation does have its upsides! It comes with the panels all in one roll and a packet of wallpaper paste and you just cut the panels apart, mix up the paste and away you go. I had three full panels and a thin fourth one. My plan was that the dimensions I ordered were just a little bit bigger than the wall and the narrow strip of the side panels that are visible down each side would be cut off. But I was in such a hurry to get it up that I didn't start the first panel over far enough and you can see the little bit of orange in the top left corner. That really irritates me because it's quite visible and I'm going try cutting it out and putting in a little patch of the beige, which being beige will be invisible after it's done 😏 Otherwise it went up really well. They recommend you have a bunch of tools, which I was loathe to go out a get (again) so I winged it with some jury-rigged tools and they worked great except the ruler I used to cut the edges. I HIGHLY recommend getting the proper edge for doing that. And also whisking the wallpaper paste powder as it goes into the water, otherwise it goes really lumpy. And be more generous with the paste than you think you need to be. But other than those completely self-inflicted issues, it looks So. Good. The teenage daughter even came to tell me so and the husband also really likes it so if it can win over those two very tough critics I'm sure not complaining! And all up it took me maybe 45 minutes to do, plus the time it took to clean the wall. Highly recommend!

 If you think you'd be interested in giving it a go yourself you can use the code hazelnutgirl2021 which will give you a 25% discount on any product on the Photowall website and is valid from June 11 through August 15, 2021.