For the last few weeks I have been looking forward to sharing how to hang permanent wallpaper in a temporary way. I did a lot of research, considered the options, and decided upon the best plan of action that would not only allow us to easily remove the wallpaper, but also reuse it in a future home.
We even brought in the professionals, Kim and Scott, to help us with our mission. (No, they are not actually professionals, but they are as close as you come.)
After combing through dozens of (mostly) half baked ideas on how to hang wallpaper in a rental, we came upon the most sane solution that didn’t require us to wallpaper an entire wall of foam boards/plywood or nail it in place.
I know that many of you might also be scratching your heads wondering why I didn’t just pick a sticky, temporary wallpaper to begin with. The truth is that I have been in love with Oh Joy’s Hygge & West Petal Pusher in my all-time favorite color combo, white and gold, for years. In fact, my canvas art that got me on the Nate Show was inspired by her wallpaper.
And the idea of turning our ho-hum 9’9″x12′ master bedroom into something other than a white, bland box was irresistible. Seriously, it was looking a bit blah.
The room is so small I have a hard time capturing the wall we wallpapered without a wide angle lens. But this gives you a pretty good idea of how boring the space was originally.
The best temporary tape to use with wallpaper, that would also not show through the paper, and was most likely to not stick to the wall permanently was Frog Tape’s Delicate Surface. It’s light yellow, made to remove from wallpaper easily, and is the lightest stickiness level of painters tape.
I even told the team at Frog Tape about my plan and they were so excited to see the results they sent us a few boxes of the tape to use for the project.
Things were looking good.
Last Saturday Mr. Lively, Kim, Scott, and I assembled as a team. We had our game plan set, and our supplies ready.
Kim and I measured each piece of wallpaper to line up with the next (a tricky business with the bold flower outlines). We decided on a vertical stripe pattern.
While we worked on the papers, the guys worked on outlining the wall in Frog Tape, too.
Once they had the tape stripes in place, they layered on the double sided tape (we got ours from Uline).
Though this looks simple, this took us hours to do.
After trying the vertical stripes, we realized smoothing was going to be a major problem.
So we switched to a horizontal repeat instead.
This meant we had to remove the tape on the wallpaper and the wall. Thank goodness we had the yellow Frog Tape, it stuck when we needed it to, and peeled easily away when we needed to start over.
And after five hours of hard work we had two strips in place.
But as you can tell, no matter how hard we tried to smooth the paper down perfectly on the tape, bubbles inevitably popped up.
Someone even mentioned that the installation made it look like cheap wrapping paper.
Which was devastating after getting so pumped to ‘finally crack the code’ to hanging permanent wallpaper temporarily.
So we took it all down and lived with it for a few days.
Yuck.
And found a really, really great husband and wife team that hang wallpaper beautifully. The traditional way. (Email me if you’d like their Chicago info!)
It turns out that removing this wallpaper is as simple as heating the wallpaper with a blowdryer and slowly removing the strips.
Who knew it would be that easy all along.
So I really am sorry, guys. I thought I would be able to share an easy way to hang wallpaper temporarily, but at least I’ve tried a way that I would not recommend for large walls or reflective wallpaper. I suppose that’s a win, right?
Plus, the end result is still beautiful, regardless of our failed attempts. And that’s really all that matters.
I’d like to thank Hygge & West for their support and Frog Tape for donating their tape for this endeavor!
