We have grasscloth wallpaper in the living room that was there when we bought the house 10 years ago. It’s only the part of the wall beneath the chair rail that has it, the part above the chair rail is painted. The wallpapered part is about 3 feet tall.
The dog and cats have done quite a number on the wallpaper. When the cats were tiny little kittens, they loved to climb it. It really needs to be replaced and I have been looking at wallpaper online. The wall above the rail needs to be painted.
I am toying with the idea of taking the wallpaper off and painting that part of the wall instead of replacing the wallpaper. I am a really good painter, but I’ve never wallpapered before and the idea frankly intimidates me.
How difficult would it be to prepare the previously papered area for painting? Should I use a different types of paint for the above- and below-the-rail area, like a flat above and a gloss below?
Do you get HGTV? There are whole shows centered around the idea of painting rooms. You’d probably get some good ideas from them.
Go to a corner of the room and see how easy it is to remove the wallpaper.
It’s kind of a crap shoot. If the paper comes off easy, life is good. If it pulls off the wall board or the plaster, life is bad; you have to repair the plaster or fix/replace the wall board. Do you know what is under the grass cloth? Plaster or drywall?
Our kid’s house had grass-cloth on every wall in the living room*. We were very reluctant to remove it assuming that the plaster behind it was bad. However, it turned out that the plaster was good and the grass-cloth came right off with only a little bit of damage.
*For Og’s sake, why would you put grass cloth over good plaster???
Paint.
Paint it.
Put paint on the wall.
Remove the wall paper and put up paint in its place.
Smear paint on the drywall.
Get a color of paint you like and use that.
Don’t put up wallpaper unless you really, really like it. IMNSHO, wallpaper is a pain in the butt. You KNOW it will have to come down eventually, and removing the stuff is a real pain. My thoughts are that you should put a $20 bill behind each and every piece of wallpaper you put up, as long as the piece is big enough to cover the bill. It’s small enough compensation for the poor schmuck that has to remove the paper. I’ve had to remove too much wallpaper, and I didn’t enjoy it. With paint, you just clean the wall, repair any dings, holes, and scratches, and paint it. With wallpaper, you’re scraping, scoring, spritzing, steaming, scraping some more, scrubbing, swearing, cursing, and not finding those $20 bills that some cheap bastard didn’t put there when they should have. And after all of that, you still need to fill in the gouges and scrapes you made when you scraped the old paper off.
But some people might think I’m a tad biased, so you do what you want. As long as you don’t want to put up wallpaper, that is…
I agree that paint is better than wallpaper for a number of reasons.
As for colors. I would paint the area below the chair rail 2 shades darker or more than the area about the chair rail. It looks great and the darker color will show fewer of the scuffs from the animals.
I’m with RalfCoder I hate wallpapering ~ is wallpapering a word?
To be fair, some wallpaper is pretty easy to put up and quite easy to take down. The hardest piece to put up is the first - getting it square and started in the right place is important. After that, you just match the pattern if there is one… OK, there is a bit more involved, but my husband and I hung a vertical stripe wallpaper in our dining room and managed to stay married. Then my daughter and I papered a bathroom, and I wasn’t forced to sell her to a passing circus.
But painting is a lot easier. Personally, I prefer a darker color below and a related lighter shade above, or using the same color throughout, letting the trim be the contrast. And I like eggshell or satin finish, but I’d never mix them in one room. Although I did see one show on HGTV where they got the identical color paint in eggshell and semi-gloss, then used a stencil for applying the semi-gloss over the eggshell. It was a nice, subtle effect.