How to glue meter wallpaper

Everything flows and changes, including the world of wallpaper. Recently, along with traditional rolls, called meter-long rolls have appeared on sale. For their manufacture, different materials are used: non-woven, paper, fabric, bamboo. With undoubted advantages, they have not yet found the scale of application that they deserve. People are accustomed to the standard, 53-centimeter, width. Or maybe you should move away from stereotypes and find out how to glue meter-long wallpapers correctly and beautifully?

Advantages and disadvantages

The term “meter-long wallpaper” is conditional: under this name one can also find 90-centimeter rolls, and tubes are much wider than a meter. Belgian manufacturers, for example, produce canvases reaching a width of 1.4 m.

Meter wallpapers came to us from abroad, where they long appreciated their merits:

• They make gluing better, reducing the number of joints on the walls at least twice.
• Save time and energy: it is easier to cut and paste 5 strips of meter wallpaper instead of 9-10 standard size.
• They are cheaper than traditional material: the price of one wide tube is less than the cost of two standard ones.

Disadvantages:

• It can only be placed on a flat surface: with defects in good joining, wallpaper panels cannot be reached.
• Consumption, compared with the standard ones, can increase: because of the strip of a few centimeters, you will have to buy an additional wide roll.
• It’s difficult to stick meter wallpaper alone, sometimes it’s completely unrealistic.

Tools and materials

To work, you will need:

• pencil;
• plumb line;
• tape measure or tape;
• roller or spatula;
• masking tape;
• wide brush;
• knife;
• clean rag or sponge.

With significant flaws of the glued surfaces, putty, primer, sandpaper will be needed.

You need to take care of wallpaper glue in advance. When choosing it, one should not forget that different types of wallpaper (non-woven for painting, paper, vinyl and others) require their own type of adhesive.

Wall preparation

The basis for meter-long wallpaper should be perfectly smooth. The operations themselves are traditional, but they must be carried out with special care so that subsequently there are no insoluble problems with the joining of wallpaper paintings.

1. Nails, screws, self-tapping screws are removed from the walls, switches and sockets are removed, the holes are sealed with masking tape.
2. The old coating is removed: wallpaper, plaster, paint, etc. How to do it right is described in this article.
3. The next step is sanding the walls.
4. In case of serious irregularities it is necessary to use putty.
5. The surface is covered with 1-2 layers of primer. So she will not absorb wallpaper glue, and the adhesion of the paintings to the wall will improve.
6. If planned glue non-woven wallpaperused to shine through, white primer or paint is applied last.

Tip: you can start applying glue to the base only after the primer has become completely dry.

Marking walls and cutting cloths

Wide wallpapers are glued butt, so the work can be started from any convenient place.

• So that the first strip lies on the wall extremely smoothly, a vertical line is drawn with a plumb line and a pencil. It will become the starting point of the sticker.

• Before the start of cutting, it is not superfluous to measure the length of the wall and determine the number of strips placed on it.
• When cutting, it is necessary to leave 10 cm above and below each wallpaper sheet for a margin. Do not forget about the allowance for combining the pattern. Excesses can easily be removed with a sharp knife after the glue dries.
• Rolls roll out on a dry clean surface face down, measure the desired length. Having made a notch, they bend and cut along the resulting seam.

Important! High humidity in the room where the sticker is wallpaper is undesirable. Draft is completely unacceptable, great coolness is also contraindicated. It is best to glue at a temperature of 15–25 ˚С.

Sticker process

Depending on the type, meter wallpaper is fixed in different ways:

1. Paper canvases. The material is first spread with glue, then comes the sticker on a dry base.
2. Non-woven Varieties. The technology is exactly the opposite: the wall is covered with glue, the strips are applied to it dry.
3. Heavy vinyl wallpapers. The adhesive panels are also coated with wallpaper panels and the wall.

Baguettes should be placed before gluing. About why they should not be mounted on top of the finish coating, it is written here.

To work with meter wallpaper, a partner is needed: the first person holds one edge of the strip, the second holds it from the opposite side. It is convenient to use two step-ladders at once - so leveling the wallpaper on the walls is much simpler and faster.

Sequencing:

• Glue is applied to the back of paper and vinyl wallpapers with a paper base. Non-woven panels are left without it. Paper are applied to a dry base. For the rest, glue is applied with a roller to the wall along the width of the wallpaper with an additional grip of about 20 cm.
• Joints and corners are carefully smeared with a brush. Especially high-quality glue is applied on the top of the wall.
• Glue the cut start from above, aligning it with the intended vertical. To do this, holding the cloth by the upper edge, climb the ladder and attach it strictly to the junction of the ceiling and the wall. The coincidence with the intended vertical controls the partner.
• After checking, the strip is leveled with a plastic spatula or rubber roller. The choice of fixture depends on the type of wallpaper: a hard tool can damage the texture of the canvas. You should start from the middle of the strip, expanding the range of movements: from the center - to the sides, up and down.
• To get rid of air bubbles, the wallpaper is carefully smoothed from the center to the edges. Pressing with the tip of a spatula, additionally work out the corners, joints of the wallpaper with a baguette and baseboard.
• With the same 20-centimeter supply, a second glue line is applied. This is necessary so that with further actions the glue does not get on the wallpaper. The next cut is glued and joined with the first.
• After smoothing, you need to walk along the joint with a rubber roller.
• All subsequent canvases are glued in the same way.

Tip: you need to catch the new wallpaper before the start of the heating season, as the hot air near the batteries wrinkles.

Work in difficult areas

Widescreen wallpapers complicate pasting corners, the space behind the batteries and above the openings. For inconvenient places, experienced craftsmen advise cutting the canvas into more compact parts and applying glue that dries slowly and allows time for error correction.

Angles

An attempt to make a corner with a solid canvas is guaranteed to lead to failure: it will skew, wrinkles without trimming, which will not affect the appearance of the wallpaper in the best way, can be eliminated. But if this does not happen, the curvature of the angle will necessarily violate the perpendicularity of the canvas, and further the number of defects will only increase.

The correct actions:

1. A strip is cut out 5 cm more than the width from the corner to the glued wallpaper.
2. The wall and corner are carefully coated with glue.
3. Wallpaper is glued with a 5-centimeter margin on the adjacent side of the corner.
4. The narrowest place of the lap is determined, where at a distance of 1 cm from the edge of the wallpaper, a mark is put through which a vertical line is drawn.
5. With an orientation on it, the next canvas is glued.
6. The seam is cut with a spatula, ruler, clerical knife.

Batteries

Wallpaper under the windowsill is pasted last. Work will require patience and accuracy, bordering on virtuosity.

• The wallpaper sheet is cut to the size of the radiator niche.
• In sections matching the battery mounts, vertical cuts are made.
• The section covered with glue is carefully led behind the pipes.
• The next task is to straighten the folds formed on the sheet and press it against the wall. Due to the tightness, it is impossible to act with a paint roller, so they are smoothed with rags.
• Overlap impose on the edge of already pasted wallpaper
• Firmly pressing both layers with a spatula, make a vertical cut.
• The joint remaining after removing the cut strips will become invisible upon drying.

If such an operation could not be performed, the wallpaper is cut into smaller parts and the pasting of the hard-to-reach place is continued.

Sockets and switches

The wallpaper is glued directly to the holes remaining after removing the switches and outlets, the contours of which will be visible. Then, in these places, the cloth is crosswise cut with a wallpaper knife. Notched sections of wallpaper are seasoned inside. For round outlets, cuts are made star-shaped.

Some switches cannot be removed without removing the entire mechanism. In this case, trimming is carried out without removing the protective panel.

• The wallpaper strip is glued only to the switch, with a sharp knife at the corners of its frame punctures are made, which serve as a guide for the cross-shaped incision.
• After cutting with a spatula, the edges are tightly pressed, the excess is removed, the edges are carefully rolled to the wall and the sticker of the rest of the panel is continued.

Openings

On the doorways, the wallpaper is cropped. On arches and windows, they are also cut to the size of the opening, not forgetting to carefully monitor that the drawing is combined.

What to do if you have to glue alone?

Sometimes you can dispense with fixing the meter-long wallpaper without an assistant - the non-woven varieties of the material will help out, because glue in this case is applied only to the wall. Non-woven fabric will help to easily joint the joints even in corners. There are no special difficulties with the alignment of the bands. If it was not possible to correctly stick the sheet immediately, the panel is removed and the operation is repeated again - non-woven allows this. But meter-long wallpaper from other materials will not allow this, a partner in such cases is necessary.

A lesson on sticking wide canvases is in the video below.