With the underwear of lining paper installed, it’s time to put on the tuxedo of the wallpaper. I purchased Bradbury wallpaper for the bathroom which isn’t cheap and maybe not recommended for a person’s first wallpaper installation. Installing the lining paper did give me some practice and for the real installation I rely on Karen to help with the details since I learned that I tore a fair bit of the lining paper during installation.

Bradbury papers need to be trimmed before hanging.

The first trick is that Bradbury papers all need to be trimmed before hanging. I’m not sure why they don’t come pre-cut, but you need to make vertical trims on both sides of the paper to remove over printing. There are cutting marks that you need to line up a straight-edge against and then cut the paper with a razor blade. Any waviness in the cuts affects the next sheet because you have to butt the 2 pieces against eachother.

We pre-cut all of the paper so we can focus on hanging once we mix up the paste. We go with wheat paste - same as what was used for the lining paper. I paste up the sheets and let them set for 10 minutes and then start hanging them. For the first sheet we put a laser line on the wall to make the first edge plumb.

The Bradbury paper is a bit more durable than the lining paper and luckily no tears. It does get a little tricky to clean off the paste because wiping it did seem to start stripping off the ink. The first sheet goes on easy due to no obstacles but after the first sheet the rest is all dealing with some cuts. First up is a doorway which Karen cuts out the around the wood.

We then have to deal with the HVAC vent and a vent pipe until we then get to a corner. The corner requires a slight overlap and we need to cut the sheet so that coming around the corner it only overlaps about 1/8-1/4”. You then put a laser line on the wall coming out of the corner and reset the paper to align to that since it’s rare a corner is plumb. The corners in the bathroom are definitely out of wack and it becomes tricky to align the pattern because it becomes an optical illusion when coming out of the skewed corner.

We get about 60"% of the room done before running out of time. It mostly goes fine although a few seams having some white from either the cut exposing white paper or not perfectly matching. Because the edges are hand-cut, I’m not sure how to get a 100% clean edge. After the paper sets, I make sure to roll out all of the seams with a wood roller.