My Love/Hate Relationship with Wallpaper
I really do I love wallpaper...but I also hate wallpaper. I love the history and interest wallpaper lends to an old Victorian home. I love the splash of color and pattern a beautifully chosen wallpaper adds to a bedroom. I love a meandering antique floral in a dining room or a navy toile in a powder room. In my opinion that type of wallpaper is timeless. But then something happened in the 1980s and continued into the 1990’s. It could be known as wallpaper’s scandalous dark ages where cutesy kitchen borders reigned supreme. I’m wondering if everything old can truly become trendy and new again, even 80s wallpaper. You never know what will come back in style.
My husband has an aversion to all things floral print. Ironically, the first home we bought together was a fabulous monstrosity, which of course, was covered in wallpaper. It had been a factory in its former life but transformed into a 3-story (4 stories including the basement) row home in the 1980s. The remnants of the factory were our favorite parts. There were soaring ceilings, exposed brick walls, original wood beamed ceilings and the original elevator shaft complete with the (inoperable) elevator in our basement. Its most striking feature was a 3-story open staircase in the center with a skylight at the top. We loved the location too. It was in the “city” of Lancaster, Pennsylvania where we could stroll to the corner coffee shop and walk downtown to Lancaster’s famous Central Market. It was dreamy! But wow was there a lot of wallpaper! Horrible 1980s wallpaper. Wallpaper that covered the light switch plates in the dining room, kitchen, bathrooms, and bedrooms. Wallpaper was not trendy in 2002. It was so far from fabulous. So we spent our weekends laboring over stubborn wallpaper removal from all surfaces. We tried all of the solutions, special tools, scrapers, and steamers. Do you know how long it takes to remove an entire room of wallpaper one 2-inch square at a time? It’s endless. We would cheer when we managed to remove a large strip at once. My husband said on many occasions during our endless scraping and scrubbing “we will never buy another house with wallpaper again.”
But we did. Our sprawling city monstrosity with its open staircase and glass walls that we loved so much was quickly becoming a potential death trap for our soon-to-be toddler. Once our son was born, we migrated out of the “city” to a much more appropriate suburban home built in the 1970s. The wallpaper in this home was much more understated and not as “I need it off of my walls this instant” horrible. We lived with it for most of our time there. I painted over the mauve (is that even still a color) and pink tones, because covering walls with paint is much easier when you don’t have to first remove wallpaper. Then when we were ready to sell this home, we finally tackled the wallpaper removal, knowing that potential buyers would view it as dated. And again we struggled. And again my husband declared “never again!”
But we did again. When we relocated to Northeast Pennsylvania we fell in love with a 1950s ranch home. We loved the beautiful details and deep set picture windows that overlooked the wooded landscape of our cozy home. We loved one-floor living and our practical layout. But unfortunately, our home’s most recent update was most likely in the early 1990s. And yep, you guessed it, that included wallpaper. We immediately tackled our son’s bedroom since 5-year old boys don’t tend to love floral stripes. We then abolished the kitchen border. Then we stopped. We totally lost momentum. At one point I started removing the horrible bathroom wallpaper, but remembering how labor intensive it really is, I stopped midway through. And I’m embarrassed to say I left it like that for awhile, quite possibly for two years because no one but us ever went in there. We finally tackled it (or more accurately hired someone to tackle it) when we were getting the house ready to sell for our big move to Virginia. So why, you may wonder, would I even consider wanting to experiment with wallpaper in my new house, which is blessedly, perfectly wallpaper-free?
Wallpaper is really beautiful now! 2020 home decor boasts a whole new wallpaper revolution. Warm, bold, large patterns and modern geometric shapes are front and center in room design. You see it all over Pinterest and HGTV on gorgeous accent walls. But I’m sure home decorators in the 1980s and 1990s said the same thing about the styles they chose to cover their walls. What makes current wallpaper trends so wonderful is that they offer peel and stick options. You can actually purchase wallpaper that is more like a durable contact paper to apply to your walls, and then when the trends change, you can easily remove it. Total gamechanger! If this technology existed in the 1980s, our home improvement projects would have been much less torturous. I love the idea of a bold design accent wall in my living room office or covering my powder room in a fun mid-century modern pattern. And with peel and stick options I may just dive into living with wallpaper. Because if we ever decide to sell this home, which our history shows is likely at some point down the road, we can easily expose our neutral wall colors again with a simple peel-off.
