A Beginners Guide to Installing Wallpaper

The moment we got all of our furniture in and looked around, I knew we must, must install wallpaper. Our Master Bedroom space is bright, light and filled with huge walls that were just begging to be decorated, which made it the perfect location to install our first wallpaper mural.

"The Crawford" from Murals Wallpaper proved to be the PERFECT match for our space. And, it only took a few hours for two newbies, who are admittedly not very handy, to install. I documented the process and put together a few tips that helped us along the way below!

Size the Wall

Murals Wallpaper made it incredibly easy for us to measure the wall. All you have to do is send them your walls height and width, and they'll scale your mural accordingly. I added a few inches to both the height and width to allot for any mistakes and to make sure that we had enough wallpaper to cover the full wall.

If the wall that you're working on has a slope, door, or any obstructions i'd recommend sending the measurements as a whole rectangle or square. And, instead, cutting away the excess during your installation process. We cut around a door and a few outlets and it worked out perfectly.

Get your Supplies

Once you've sized your wall and ordered your wallpaper, you have to stock up on a few additional supplies. We purchased wallpaper adhesive, a roller and paint brush, smoothing brush or plastic smoother, knife, ruler.

Install

Our Mural arrived in 8 perfectly sized panels, making it so much easier for us to install. We started by using our roller to brush on the wallpaper adhesive in the far left corner of the wall. We used a paint brush as we got near the base boards, ceiling and sides to make it a little more clean. It's truly JUST like painting a wall, and is difficult to mess up!

After painting the adhesive onto the wall, we took the first panel and stuck it to the wall from the top down. We made sure to smooth the panel out as we headed towards the bottom. My biggest tip here is to use your smoothing tool to get all the air bubbles out as soon as you can. We would start with our smoothing tool in the middle and work each bubble our by pushing towards the sides. There will be times you have to peal it off and try again, which is completely fine! You can always add new adhesive and start over.

Then, you move on from panel to panel making sure to line up the design as you go. It made it MUCH easier to have two of us installing because I would keep it straight while Jordon focused on holding it up.

Cut the Excess

As you install each panel you'll want to trim the excess wallpaper off the top and bottom. We did this by using the edge of the smoothing tool and an exacto knife. It helped us to keep it straight and tidy!

The trickiest portion of our wall was the outlet and door. Here, we used scissors and the exact to slowly trim down the wallpaper. Take your time and just trim it down slowly to keep it as clean as possible.

If you do mess up, which did happen to us a few times, you can ALWAYS cover it up. We installed a small bit of trim along the top of our wall to cover a few messy tops, and you'd never be able to tell.

Here's the deal. Wallpapering is REALLY tough the first panel or two. Like, I thought we were headed for divorce tough (hah.). BUT, after panel two, it was smooth sailing for us. We figured out a process that worked for us, and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out!

Find more of our home decor posts here.

XO,

K

Thank you to Murals Wallpaper for Sponsoring this post. As always, thank you for supporting brands that support Simply J and K.