Rediscovering Wallpaper

Throughout the 1990?s painting was the trend for all rooms in a home. However, since the turn of the century, wallpaper has been making quite a comeback in popularity. Once again you are seeing it grace the walls of powder rooms, full bathrooms, dining rooms and kitchens. It is a nice trend to see. Rooms that accent the house with wallpaper add new dimension, interest and texture to an otherwise predictably painted environment. If you are in the design phase of home building project, you should give wallpaper some serious consideration. As with many home improvement products, more designs are available to the general public now than ever before.

Powder Room:

One terrific place to use wallpaper as an accent in your home is the powder room. This usually small space is perfect for making an impression on your guests. It is also a very limited way to reintroduce wallpaper into your life, but still be able to enjoy an interior design statement which makes your home unique. Don?t be afraid to select dark or textured wallpapers for the powder room. Even though it is small, drama is what you are after here, or you would just be painting it the color of the rest of the house. Darkness and textures deliver drama.

Master Bath:

Wallpaper is also making a comeback in the master as well as other bathrooms of the home. Remember the days when each room of a house might have a different colored carpet? One great thing about wallpaper in a bathroom is that it allows each member of the family to express their own tastes while allowing the other elements, like carpet and trim color, maintain the home?s continuity.

Dining Room:

Wallpaper in the dining room is an excellent way to make it known that you have excellent tastes in interior design. How many houses have you been into today that have a living room right across the entrance from the dining room? It is usually the large table and chairs that gives away which one the dining rooms is, but if it weren?t for that, who would know? Wallpaper is a great solution for rooms that lack personality. However, if you are tempted to buy the fabric that matches the wallpaper, then you have gone too far. There are too many beautiful fabrics just waiting on the bolt for you to coordinate with your new wallpaper to create an intensely interesting room. Considering wallpaper in your dining room is a wonderful idea, and you will make a room so unique in your home that your relatives will remember in which room they spent the holidays.

Kitchen:

Kitchens are another great place to accent with wallpaper. Like the powder room, the kitchen is an excellent place to experiment and reintroduce wallpaper back into your life. In this room, the cabinets and tile backsplash take up so much of the wall that you are left with a minimum amount of space for any finish material. Wallpaper is also a fairly easy surface to clean in the kitchen, which has become the hearth of the home in today?s designs.

Care with Selection:

Tasteful selection is the key here. In this writer?s opinion, you should stay away from anything at which you could look and think, ?How dated will this look in five years, in ten years?? If you are wondering what would fit into this category, think about extremely oversized floral prints, overly bright colors and old style metallic papers. If you even have the slightest feeling that a paper would become outdated, then do not select it. Instead, for example, look for natural fibers, like silk and woven papers such as the newer grass cloths. Spend some time looking at top of the line wallpapers and then depending on your budget, locate something that is most similar to the more expensive papers. Since wallpaper can be used as an accent, paying a bit more for luxurious wallpaper is a very controlled way to do something special in your home.

Installation:

Finally, if you live in a home that was constructed with all textured and painted walls, it requires a bit of an effort to retro-fit any room with wallpaper. Of all of the do it yourself jobs, that would be an excellent time to leave it to a professional. Call a drywall company and inquire about the process it takes to prepare textured sheetrock for papering. The good news is that there are some very heavy gauge papers on the market that can be applied over a very lightly textured wall. If you are designing a home or have bought one early on in the construction phase, let the architect and builder know that you have plans for wallpaper in certain rooms. That way they can have their drywall people prepare the walls accordingly.

Enjoy the process of rediscovering wallpaper. It can be a beautiful addition to any d?cor and give a home, which lacks personality, an interior designer look.