How to Refresh your Kid's Room with Wallpaper

We hung wallpaper in my daughter's room in fun and simple unconventional ways.

Once we’d moved her bed out of the way, we measured the wall and figured out how wide and how high to make our wallpaper arch. Eleanor likes her headboard, so we wanted the arch to be tall enough so she could keep her headboard if she wanted.

We found a floor area downstairs that was just large enough to unroll our wallpaper. We taped it in place, matched the pattern, and rolled it out enough to cover the area we’d measured upstairs. I used green Frogtape to hold the paper in place but should have used their yellow tape for delicate surfaces to be safe and to prevent any tearing.

With the paper lined up, I tied a piece of twine to a thumbtack and had Eleanor hold it in place in the center of our "headboard." I tied a pencil to a length of twine the same length as our headboard radius. With Eleanor holding the thumbtack steady, it acted as the center point so I could stretch the twine taut and draw an arch. We untaped the paper, drew straight lines on either side, and carefully cut it out.

Upstairs in the bedroom, we measured and lightly marked where the headboard needed to go with a pencil so we would have guidelines. Eleanor was in charge of drawing the arch this time. We used a wallpaper paste
that gets painted on the wall first, then carefully smoothed the first strip of our wallpaper headboard in place. It's always a good idea to use a level to draw your first vertical guideline.

For the other side of the room, Eleanor asked for some floating shelves, and since they are plain white, I suggested maybe bringing the wallpaper onto the front of these, as well. Eleanor really liked the idea, so we measured our paper and centered it on the pasted shelves. We’re only covering the front faces of the shelves to save paper but also to make it so we could still wipe down the top shelves if needed which would not be possible with wallpaper on there. We learned after installation, that we should have lightly scuffed up the melamine shelves. The paste wasn't strong enough to hold the paper in place so we ultimately just used double stick tape which worked just as well.

The shelves were pretty simple to hang. They have a weight limit of 15 to 20 pounds each and mount on plastic anchors. Eleanor knows not to load them down with lots of books and is excited to display some of her artwork and favorite things.