wallpaper...yes or no??

monkeyupatree · Feb 29, 2008 12:51 am

We are slowly renovating our current house, and I want to know if wallpaper is a better option to paint on some of our walls. Our walls (being in WA) are double brick with white plaster over the grey...Anyhoo, as our paint is/was peeling off, we thought that we would *stupidly* pull off the paint, so that we could seal the plaster before repainting anew. We have done 2 rooms- the hallway 'L' shaped and 1 small bedroom. 1 wall in each room, are badly patched up..... in the hallway it is the wall you see as you walk in the house, (it is in front of the bathroom and I guess at one stage the shower was leaking as the plaster was crumbling), it had been patched up numerous times: ie: paint, plaster, paint, plaster, paint. It is the same on one wall of the bedroom, badly patched. Trying to fix it up was a nightmare, (hence the word *stupidly* up there

) , for a start, some of the paint in the bedroom wouldnt peel off, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't scrape it off as the plaster between the paint was too hard. Same as the hallway, but we also had to contend with the dips and bumps of badly applied plaster, water damaged walls. You can see the ridges of paint layers in the bedroom, and big bows and hills on the hallway wall.
I feel as if the paint has made it stand out more, (hallway has fudge/cocoa candy and bedroom has kid leather both wattyl) and wonder if wall paper would be better at covering it? If it is, would we have to do a feature wall in every room in wall paper/paint? The bedroom is the smallest one out of the four.
For the hallway I was thinking of something along the lines of this:
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y89/jericoholicau/wallpaper.jpg (the pic is from ebay, I really liked this but hubby didnt)

I dont even know where to go to look at/buy wallpaper, and what is the price compared to paint? Hubby is just inclined to 'leave it' but I prefer to have it looking decent rather than "it'll pass!" I dont want potential buyers put off, because they can see every flaw in the plaster. If you need a photo of the walls I can get some.

TIA

BTW: We will not be pulling off the paint in any other room unless we really have too, we will be doing what everyone before us has done and paint straight over it, I am amazed at how much plaster came of with the paint and how bad the patching looks after.

d@n · Feb 29, 2008 10:30 am

I've grown up in a house that had wallpaper in just about every room. Suffice to say I hate the stuff now. But the only reason it was never removed was because the wallpaper was holding the plaster in place. So I understand your situation.

3timesbuilda · Feb 29, 2008 11:48 am

When doing one wall, decieded to try sand off some earlier problems and landed up making some physical bumpiness. Looked terrible.

Applied multiple coats - can't remember how many maybe 8 or 12 and it just smoothed itself out. Not a particuarly elegant solution but still looked nice afterwards.

Don't like wallpaper - would all come down and factor in expense of doing so into value of house. Wallpaper seems to be a very personal choice.

DeeElle · Mar 04, 2008 9:25 pm

not sure about wallpaper myself. Being at the mercy of my parents decorating skills in the 70's was bad enough. However I might give it another go .. on the obligatory feature wall :wink:

.

there are a lot of textured paint products around that offer a nice alternative to flat paint as well.

Kryten · Mar 05, 2008 10:11 pm

I'm not a huge wallpaper fan but there have definitely been improvements since the bad old days of the 70's.

I remember a story my mother told me about some wallpaper which was in a gold colour that she and my father had spent about two days putting up just after they bought their first house . They went out, and the sun must have hit the wallpaper just right, because when they came home the cat had been chasing the lights across the wallpaper and had managed to scratch it up pretty badly, and left nice little wallpaper strips hanging off the wall :roll:

Dana