France in Focus

Having decided to tart up the hallway, I proceeded with a bit of filling and sanding down, when I was happy with that I applied a weak solution of solvite paste to seal the whole wall and after that had dried, pasted the wall, with a thicker mixture, and applied lining paper. That looked OK for the first 10 minutes but as the glue soaked in to the lining paper it started bubbling up, next morning it had all dried and was nice and flat. So cometh the vinyl, again I pasted the wall and stuck the sheet of wallpaper on to the paste, absolute disaster, having got it reasonably flat the bubbles started to appear, and it was impossible to rectify, so I walked away hoping it would flatten as it dried out. No such luck it more or less fell of the wall.
Whether my thinking is right or wrong but I think that by pasting the lining paper to accept the wallpaper was a bad move, as it just made the lining paper bubble up again, should I be now pasting the vinyl on the pasting table and hanging up in the traditional way??

Sounds like a good idea

It's got to be a man thing, read the instructions after you have buggered it up, paste and soak for 5-7 minutes, so pasting table at the ready. Strange as a lot of paper I have recently put up says paste the wall, I thought it was the easiest way, live and learn.

The easiest way I found was to use the ready-pasted paper, which you had to soak in water for a specified time, put it on the wall and slide it into position. I think they were all vinyl papers, though.

We have just papered a corridor wall. Lined with toile de verre paste applied to wall. Some bubbles appeared and disappeared overnight. Then blown vinyl. Applied same type of glue to toile de verre, paper was a bit tricky and bubbles appeared but the following day all good. I will never paste a piece of paper again.

Headers wrote: ↑Sat Apr 05, 2025 5:34 pm I will never paste a piece of paper again.

We came to the same conclusion.

Been ages since I wallpapered.
i never used a lining paper, and I always pasted the paper never the wall.
Taught by my Mum and she could do everything!

When I worked in "the trade" everyone pasted the paper, not the wall. The notable exception was when ICI brought out a product called Vymura. It was a very thin vinyl with no paper backing. You were meant to paste the wall, not the product. The trade hated it and some of them told me they would try to convince their customer to choose a more conventional paper.

In my view pasting the wall is asking for trouble because if you take a little too long positioning a drop the rest of the wall is drying out. The last one to be placed will run the risk of poor adhesion. But hey, maybe the materials are much better developed these days so the method is sound.

I'd rather be boiled in oil than have to live with walllpaper. Quicker and easier to update a room with emulsion than paper with a pattern that falls out of fashion next year.

As a beginner, I used a vinyl paper to cover a wall aside a staircase. I covered the paper with paste, tucked it up carefully and took it to the wall to hang from the ceiling down. Sure enough, the weight of the pasted paper stretched the paper and pattern so it was impossible to get the second drop to match up with the first.

My one and only brush (gerr'it) with vinyl wallpaper.

We papered a wall in our bedroom that was badly damaged and neither of us was up to putting a plaster skim over it. We pasted the paper, "pleated" it and had no problems putting it on the wall : much easier for amateurs to do it à deux. The bedroom walls and ceiling were covered in a khaki-coloured fabric which had been stapled onto batons which were nailed to the walls. Quite horrible though it had been well done.
I remember hearing donkey's years ago that papering a ceiling was a recipe for divorce
Does anyone remember Artex ceilings ? There are 3 rooms upstairs whose walls have been covered in some sort of heavily textured paint, put on in swirls (I've seen that sort of thing at Leroy Merlin). After removing a little test area, we could see it had been done to cover the bad surfaces of the walls underneath. So I've just painted on top ....