The Basement Project: Series 4 - Bamboo Wallpaper Goes Up!

Not too long ago, Oprah announced on her show that “wallpaper is back”, and I’ll second that one. It’s all over the blogosphere as a way to dress up your room or put on an accent wall. Funny thing is, when we first bought our house 3 years ago and I saw all of the wallpaper in it, my first thought was GET RID OF IT! And sure, there was some super old yellowed wallpaper with designs from the 1960s but there was one wallpaper that we decided to keep, and that was that was the bamboo wallpaper in the basement. This wallpaper was on the staircase wall and a small area of a wall adjacent to it. However with the foundation repair we had to tear down the wall adjacent to the staircase and up went plastic sheeting. It pretty much took us a YEAR to figure out what to do with it… and guess what?? We decided to put the exact same bamboo wallpaper back up! We already had painted walls, a brick wall, and a bamboo wall we wanted to keep consistency. Thing is, we had to find one that matched the one on the staircase, and lucky for us, Lowe’s had an Asian Inspirations wallpaper book that we found it in. But talk about expensive… it ended up being like $60 for a double roll… you could pretty much paint a whole house with that money, no joke!

And actually… putting up this textured wallpaper was probably the easiest 1.5 hour project ever (for our basement). I think what helped was that it was a TEXTURED wallpaper, so we didn’t have to worry about seeing bumps as much as you would with a flat wallpaper.

1. So first, we put up the old wood paneling back on top of the plastic sheeting (because the plastic sheeting had these bumps on it so we wanted a smooth surface to work with).

2. Measure out the length and width of your wall and figure out how many sheets you will need across. We decided to split ours up into three sections we measured the length of the first roll and cut!

3. Grab your paste (we just used a small container of border paste, which is the same as a bigger container of wallpaper paste but we only had a small area so we thought the border paste would be enough, and it was) and your start brushing it onto your wall.

4. Adhere your wallpaper and use a roller (or your hands) to push out the bubbles. Boo on blurry pic!

5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you’re done! The third piece was probably the hardest to measure because the width had to fit exactly within a defined area. I had to cut it 4 times before getting it right but once it fit, it was MAGICAL!