Not such a long blog for you this time at Mr. Fixing It, but hopefully something that may get you thinking next time you need to decorate a room in your home. Painting or wallpapering a wall is a choice we all have to make at some point and just like every decision that we must make unanimously, it is a critical one. The idea with wallpaper is that it can offer specialised patterns, designs and textures in sheets that you simply attatch to the wall. The same can be achieved with painting but takes either skill or stenciles, plus more time. For instance I have a friend who as a child, his mother and father painted cartoon charcters upon his wall and I was always jealous of how much better it looked than my own dinasour-clad wallpaper. The colour, texture and over all appearance of your walls, as well as looking striking, have the effect of changing the apperance of the size and shape of a room, however the choice between paint or wallpaper has many aspects that must be factored in before a decision can be made and walls can be decorated. Ease of application, cost and the variability of the area you have are the major things that must be considered.
Firstly, as stated before, wallpaper is supposed to be more easy to apply intricate patterns and designs, but if you are looking for one block colour or two block colours on a wall then a few coats of your desired paint would be more useful than attempting to layer your walls in wallpaper. Then there is also the way that some paints have nice finishes, like wallpaper vinyls, which help to reflect light in a manner that gives the wall another different texture, like glossed paint for instance. With preperation and ease of application wallpaper seems to be having a losing streak, first of all there is the removal of the old wallpaper which is long and tedious most of the time and creates a lot of mess on the floor with small flakes of wall paper that drop to the floor, instead of removing in big sheets just like it went on. Then there is the issue with actually fitting the paper to the wall and getting the wallpaper straight which again, can prove to be long and tedious. However, darker paints on the wall simply need to be painted over with a lighter colour and a few layers with a roller must be applied over the top to get yourself a nice finish, instead of tediously attampting to apply wallpaper to the length and bredth of the wall.
The durability of wallpaper is much higher and newer wallpapers can even be scrubbed and cleaned to maintain that fresh new look, where as paints when they are scrubbed become more damaged. As we discover when trying to remove wallpaper from the wall it takes more to actually pick away at the paper and the adhesive where as, after time, paint begins to flake from the wall and simply fall apart on its own. This takes much less time than you may assume. The only issue with durability of wallpaper is that bathrooms, which collect a lot of warm moist air, cause wallpaper to peel away from the much quicker as it breaks down the adhesive.
Cost wise, wallpapers are usually of better quality and therefore more constantly in comparison to the areas that can be covered with paint, the only issue is that many layers are needed to cover a wall with paint and therefore in a large area many more tins will be needed to create sufficient coats. Cheap paints can be purchased but it is the difficulty of installation that weighs down on the costs of decorating with wallpaper. However, many people seem time find comfort in making a combination of the two, adding a texture to their walls giving the room new dimesnions and painting other areas of the wall to complete the finish as a lower cost.
I hope you found this blog interesting and it helped you to come to a solution of your own towards decorating your walls. Until next time, from us at Mr.Fixing It, your decorating dudes.