A (practically) free room makeover

Although I already summed up our painting experience, I left out a major key piece. The wallpaper. That darned wallpaper. I bought it almost a year ago, after endless hours of narrowing down samples. The only reason I even settled on  it despite my indecisive nature was that I wanted something to put on my wall for our perfectly planned housewarming. Turns out, my “special order” wasn’t that special, as it took over 2 months to come in, missing my party by a long shot. I picked up my wallpaper near the end of May, and in the closet it sat until this last Friday. I figured my $150 or so worth of wallpaper wasn’t earning me any interest, so I might as well put it to some use and execute my year old decorating plan.

After I threw some paint samples on the wall to dry, the hubs and I started to wallpaper. This was my third time wallpapering, and his only time. My first two attempts weren’t quite as successful as they could have been as they were done solo (partner highly recommended for wallpapering!), so we followed the directions to a tee. We measured and precut all of the pieces we would need with the pattern perfectly matched up, filled the tray with the perfect temperature water, and primed the walls with size. I soaked it in the water for the recommended 15-20 seconds, rolled it out evenly and booked for the proper length of time. The first strip went up fairly easy. We started smoothing it over, full of anticipation of what our joint effort could bring. Dum dum dum. There it was. Our first strip of wallpaper. It looked pretty good, except for the sides were curling. Everywhere. We tried a multitude of tools to smooth the edges down, and nothing worked. I felt deflated.

Maybe it was the wall size (primer) that we used? So we tried it again, on another area of the wall with no size. Again, my luxury wallpaper failed to stick and the sides curled up like a potato chip. At this point I went from frustrated to furious. This was clearly not our fault. We did everything right! And here we are, left with 20 something strips of cut wallpaper that just won’t work. I called my resourceful mother to see if she had any tricks up her sleeve, and actually suggested we call Home Depot to see if they’d accept a return. I thought that surely there was no possibility- we had no receipt, bought it a year ago, and then cut it into a bunch of pieces. But no, Home Depot didn’t mind. The looked up our invoice since it was a special order, and then not only credited us for the cost of our wallpaper, they actually refunded it to our debit over giving us a gift card! I’m sure I would have spent the gift card anyways, but it certainly impressed me. Dear Home Depot: We love You.

The $160 or so refund completely covered the cost for our paint and supplies for our kitchen/ dining room makeover, and since the original wallpaper was bought with a gift card given to us as a housewarming gift, we really didn’t spend a penny! Now it doesn’t get any better than that. And now that it’s done, I am SO happy we decided to paint the full height of the walls as opposed to wallpapering half. So so happy! I’d post pictures, but I think I’ll wait until my wall plans are all finished!