Painting Alternatives
Find New Ways to Update Your Walls without Paint
It seems like almost every interior decorating article suggests you refresh your room by painting the walls, but what if you hate painting or you’re looking for something new and exciting? If so you’ve come to the right place. Learn new and creative ways to refresh the walls in your home without slapping a coat of paint on them.
Wallpaper
New wallpaper is not the horrid stuff of the past that is simply a nightmare to remove. New wallpaper is exciting, comes in wonderful patterns and colors, is easy to hang and best of all it’s also easy to remove. So don’t be afraid of the new stuff and go wild, it’s so easy to work with that you can change it regularly.
Fabric
Wallpapering with fabric is actually pretty easy and can really change the appearance of your room in an exciting way. First wash the fabric to check for shrinkage and to prevent color transfer onto your walls. Treat the walls with an even coat of liquid starch they apply the fabric carefully and smoothly. Then apply another coat of liquid starch on the top of the fabric and suddenly you have an incredible looking fabric wall. To remove the fabric, simply use a wet sponge to reactivate the starch and peel the fabric off.
Create your own wall covering with nontraditional items such as pages from a book, scrapbooking paper, printed family photos, soup labels, seed packets, or anything you can think of. The sky’s really the limit when it comes to wallpapering with nontraditional items.
You can use a color copier or printer to get your images more easily and uniformly. To do this method simply apply wallpaper sizing to your walls so the paper will stick better and remove more easily. Then apply wall paper paste to an area slightly larger than your piece of wall covering, then move on to the next area and slightly overlap your piece of wall covering over the last one so when it dries and shrinks slightly there is no gap. Use a damp sponge to wipe off any excess paste that gets on the top of your wall covering.
Once the wall is done, let it dry for at least 24 hours and then apply a coat of spray shellac or a layer of varnish for a more finished look.
Wall Stickers
New vinyl wall stickers are a great way to add personality and life to your walls without painting a thing and the best part is they come right off and can be reapplied somewhere else. You can choose from letters, abstract shapes, specific designs, floral patterns, characters, sports teams, and even personalized images to decorate your wall. There’s almost no end to how creative you can get with this fun new decorating alternative.
So rather than getting stuck in a rut of painting to refresh your decorating scheme, go out on a limb and try some of these alternatives to painting and watch your walls come to life in an entirely new and exciting way.
Nontraditional Wallpaper
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