Every home remodeling exercise experiences a glitch of some sort. If anyone—in an older house, at least—has ever decided to, say, re-do their kitchen, and then proceeded smoothly from start to finish without a setback, I’d like to hear about it. We have changed many things since buying this house six years ago. I’ve painted the exterior twice, repainted every interior room, hung wallpaper, applied wainscoting, installed crown molding, manufactured built-ins, replaced baseboards, hung new doors, installed new flooring in three rooms, replaced a sink and a toilet, run all new coax, and built two closets from scratch. But the kitchen project now underway represents, perhaps, the zenith of all our home remodeling projects, and it almost just turned into a fiasco.
Wallpaper is lovely. That is, I have a great appreciation for beautiful wallpaper designs, and always enjoy seeing rooms in which pretty wallpaper has been skillfully applied. A couple years ago, for example, I hung some beautiful wallpaper in the dining room. But hanging wallpaper is a drag. This isn’t because wallpaper is in-and-of-itself difficult to work with, but because every room has its own imperfections that make the job harder. There are minor obstacles, like electrical switches and outlets, windows and doors, and assorted wall fixtures. And there are major hurdles, like odd corners and angles. Sometimes you find several obstacles in one drop. Imagine, for instance, a situation in which you must work around a soffit with three angles, a corner with two, an electrical outlet, and door trim. Corners, which seem so simple in everyday life, present one of the biggest challenges. If they are even slightly out of plumb (and they almost always are), great care must be taken to navigate the corner. A terrible multiplying effect makes one incorrectly navigated corner a huge problem down the road. These are all known dangers. There are unknown dangers, too, and I just encountered the mother of them all.
First, I know one is not supposed to buy all the wallpaper for a project in one shot. This is because slight variations in color from one batch to the next may be visible when installed. This was something I had considered when we bought two extra rolls of paper to go along with another two we had purchased a couple years ago. The original plan had called for this particular grey and blue floral pattern to be hung in the bathroom, whenever that project came around. But Miriam’s affection for the design grew and grew, and eventually she decided she’d like to have it in her new kitchen. Thus, two more rolls were ordered. When they arrived I held the rolls side by side and found the colors to be identical, and felt no discomfort at our violation of a sacred rule of wallpaper.
Back in March, I began hanging wallpaper in the kitchen, which we had already emptied of all cabinets and appliances. That in and of itself was a huge job, but it got done with minimal calamity. I had four rolls of grey and blue Orla Kiely wallpaper sitting on a table in front of me. I selected one and went to work. I began at the southeast corner of the kitchen because that is the corner one sees first when entering the room. I hung the paper on the left side of the corner, then made another drop on the right side, and made a perfect match of the corner, staying plumb on both sides. I considered it a sort of miracle. I proceeded to do the south wall first, primarily because it presented the biggest challenge, and I wanted to get it out of the way. I’d have to go around a door, and cut away around several outlets, and an odd soffit or bulkhead on the west wall above where the cabinets will go. After I finished the south wall, I went back to the east wall, and continued moving to my left from the first drop I made at the corner. I worked around a window with no particular difficulty, and was making fine progress by the time I reached the end of my second roll.
I ripped the celophane of the third roll of paper, and held it up to the wall to make a dry fit with my previous drop. Something wasn’t right. The color was fine – identical, really. But the pattern was off. It looked identical. That is, it was definately the same gray and blue hydrangia floral pattern. But I could distincltly see the blue of the flower along the edge of this third roll, while on the first two, the blue of the bud didn’t reach the edge of the paper. At first I thought, okay, this is unfortunate, but I can overlap slightly, and it will still work. But then I noticed something much, much more serious. Even if I were to try and overlap, the grey leaves and blue flowers in the third and fourth rolls simply didn’t match up to the grey leaves and blue flowers of the first and second rolls. I held my tape measure up and saw to my horror that the repeats were completely different. The repeat on the first two rolls I hung (which, remember, were already glued to the wall) was twenty-five inches. The repeat on the third and fourth rolls was thirty inches. Disaster. It wasn’t that the thirty-inch pattern had an extra set of leaves between the buds so that, if I had to I could creatively cut and make it work; everything was just slightly larger, meaning no matter what I might try, it would never match up. Ever.
I stood there for a while to consider my options. I thought I recalled Miriam telling me something about this wallpaper no longer being available. And, in any event, it was expensive paper. Tracking down and buying two more rolls would still likely require pulling down what I had already hung, which would be a huge waste. Then I figured it out.
As I said, I started at the southeast corner, worked west along the south wall, before returning to the corner and working north up the east wall. This was not entirely chance, since I had my reasons, but it was a great bit of luck for me, because the exact place I ran out of the twenty-five-
inch pattern coincided exactly with where the refigerator and pantry will go when installed. I could transition from the twenty-five-inch pattern to the thirty-inch pattern at a spot that will be permanently hidden behind cabinetry. That is what I did.
I hung the first drop of thirty-inch pattern, which did not match the twenty-five-inch pattern at all. I made it to the end of the east wall, made the turn to the north wall, cut around the door and the electrical box, and got all the way to the west wall with only a couple feet of paper left to spare. I had not had an inch of the twenty-five-inch pattern left to spare when I made the transition. It occured to me that had I not started where I did in the southeast corner, and had I not done the south wall first, I would not have been able to make it work. Had I, for instance, begun with the east wall, by the time I realized the papers didn’t match, I’d have been stranded in the middle of an exposed wall with no way to hide the incongruity. 
The cleverest bit of deception I attempted to employ in this fiasco involved the position of the flower buds. As I said, the thirty-inch pattern simply does not match the twenty-five-inch pattern side-by-side. But since the patterns will never be seen next to one another, I got lucky. I just picked a place where I wanted to make the bunches of blue flowers appear to line up. I found that with the first two rolls I hung, the blue flowers fall about four inches from the ceiling. So I made sure that when I made my tansition to the thirty-inch repeat I had blue flowers fall about four inches from the ceiling. The eye is less likely to notice that the flowers forty inches down from the ceiling don’t match with what’s on the opposite wall, but the line near the ceiling is more noticable.
So, an epic disaster was narrowly avoided. In future posts I will tell you how I installed cabinets, wainscoting, various trim.
Filed under: House on May 24th, 2011 | 2 Comments »
ATLANTA – The University of Florida has a series of television advertisements that depict men and women in a variety of situations and places, each wearing some article of clothing bearing the UF logo, and greeting one another with a friendly “Go Gators!” The ads have struck me as a bit silly. Who does that? I have learned over the last couple days that a lot of people do that.