Preparing Your Walls for Wallpaper

Before you begin wallpapering there are a few things that should be done for preparation.

Preparation includes everything from clearing out the room, measuring the room to prepping and repairing the walls and deciding which wallpaper you want to use.

The first thing would be to clear everything out of the room. This makes measuring, prepping and papering a lot easier.

After you have cleared the room of everything, you will need to measure the room that you want papered. This will ensure that you purchase plenty of wallpaper and other materials to do the walls.

If you haven’t already done so, you should decide if you want to cover your walls completely with one pattern, or use a split pattern. Split patterns can be done with plain wallpaper on the top or bottom and a decorative one on the remaining section or by using paint and wallpaper. You may also opt for a plain textured wallpaper that can be painted and apply it to one half the wall while choosing a nice patterned wallpaper to use on the remainder.

Now measure the walls. For this step you will need to consider if there are pattern repeats in the paper you have chosen. If you have not already chosen a paper, you will want to calculate based on needing extra paper. 

You will measure across the floor from one wall to the other. Measure the room from front to back and then side to side. You will multiply these two lengths together to get the area of the ceiling. I know it sounds like it would be floor area but it’s not. Next you will measure the walls from top to bottom and the longest wall horizontally. Do not adjust for doors, windows or other obstacles like fireplaces. You will need extra paper to make up for trim and waste, plus if there is a repeating pattern you will need extra to compensate for that. You do this by adding the size of the repeat pattern to the height of the room.