Vintage Wallpaper in Violet’s Nursery

Brewster Home Fashions supplied the wallpaper for this project. As always, all opinions are my own.

My vision for this nursery has been vintage-whimsy. I wanted to pull in soft, sweet, feminine details while also giving space for it to be youthful and whimsical. It is for a little girl, after all! And wallpaper is so in right now, I couldn’t resist the idea of pasting it on every wall of this small room.

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I ordered way too many (like 26, I think?) wallpaper samples and after much deliberation, I landed on this one. It has those soft, feminine, vintage elements with the blooming cabbage roses, but something about it gives twirling little girl instead of grandma’s homemade cookies, you know?

I have a full wallpaper tutorial here, but here are my must have supplies for a wallpaper project.

• Brewster Home Fashions Wallpaper
• Wallpaper paste
• Roller & roller cover
• Paint tray
• Brush
• Smoothing tool
• Seam roller
• Drywall knife
• Utility knife
• Laser level

And here are three extra tips that you can use in addition to that tutorial!

Inside corners

Since I was going around the entire room, I needed to go around corners. The “fun” thing about corners is that they are never plumb (vertically level). If you wrap the paper around an inside corner and keep going, chances are that you’ll end up with a crooked pattern.

My advice is to very carefully cut your panel along that corner. With the right side of the panel (what you’ve just cut from the wall), roll it back into a tube and find the skinniest part. Measure that part and then either draw or project a level line that distance away from the corner onto your wall. Now line up the pattern on the left side, but make sure that the right side is lined up to that level line. Trim off any excess from the corner.

It is definitely more time consuming, but you’ll be glad that you did it when your pattern stays straight!

Paint color

After removing a faux brick accent wall in here, I was left with one light brown and three blue walls. A good thing to keep in mind when you’re wallpapering is how see through is your paper and what are any imperfect seams going to look like? Because if you are trying to put white wallpaper on top of a black wall, it may not turn out exactly as you had envisioned it.

Here, while my paper was not very see through even though it is mostly white, I did have two concerns. Would the one brown wall be different enough from the three blue ones that you’d be able to notice the difference through the paper? And if I have any small gaps in the paper, is that blue color going to show through and make the imperfections more noticeable?

Of course I didn’t want either of those things to happen, so I painted the walls white first. I used primer instead of paint simply because primer is cheaper, but you could use regular paint as well. Just be sure to allow for a few days before you wallpaper (especially if you’re doing a vinyl peel and stick) to allow for the paint to off gas.

Worry about your seams, but not too much.

I like to believe that my perfectionism is a gift when it comes to working on projects. I am detail oriented and will take my time to ensure that something is done well. When I’m lining up the pattern between wallpaper panels, I work pretty hard to make it as perfect as possible, but it is almost impossible to get a perfect, seamless fit across the entire length of the panel.

So my advice to you is to get your seams as close to perfect as you can and then move on. Once you step back, I promise that you will not be able to notice that the stem of that one flower ended up 1/100” off from the previous one. It will be ok. I promise! As one perfectionist to another, I give you permission to let it go.

The next step in the nursery is a shiplap ceiling, which I am SO pumped for! If you follow me on instagram, then you’ve already seen it. And if you don’t follow me there, what are you waiting for?!?! 😉

With love,
Mercedes ♥