Wallpaper Installation near you

Ask a paperhanger to look at the actual product before you order it. The way a covering is hung, how it behaves on a damp-prone wall and how hard it will be to remove in ten years are all decided by what it is made of, and the British market includes several products a general decorator may rarely handle.

Stripping is the stage that decides how long the job takes and it is almost impossible to price accurately from a photograph. Some coverings peel away dry in full lengths. Others need scoring and soaking, or a steam stripper, and multiple layers hung over decades come off in fragments. A wall that was never sized or lined before it was first papered is the difficult case, because the paste has bonded to the plaster or to the paper face of the board rather than to a prepared surface.

Once the wall is bare it is made good: filling, cutting out anything loose, and cross-lining or re-skimming where the surface is too uneven for a finished paper to sit flat. Sizing seals the wall so it does not drink the paste, and it lets each length be slid into position instead of grabbing where it first touches. Then the hanging itself is geometry. A plumb line is struck rather than trusting a corner, the pattern is centred where the eye lands first, and the final closing seam is planned into the least conspicuous corner of the room.

Steam changes the electrical situation in a room, which is worth raising before the job rather than during it. A steam stripper puts a great deal of moisture into a wall containing sockets, switches and cables, so the circuits in the room should be isolated rather than simply switched off at the accessory. Electrical work in dwellings in England is covered by Approved Document P of the Building Regulations, so if stripping reveals damaged accessories or perished cable, that is a job for an electrician rather than something to paper over.

Patterned paper is bought by the roll rather than by area, because every length has to begin at the same point in the design. The repeat is the distance before the pattern starts again, and the match type tells the hanger how neighbouring lengths line up: a straight match aligns at the same height across the seam, while an offset or drop match steps every second length down, which consumes noticeably more paper. Both are printed on the roll label with the batch number.

This is why a room full of doors, windows, chimney breasts and alcoves needs more rolls than its bare square metres suggest, and why a large repeat is expensive in offcuts before anyone allows for waste. Let the paperhanger count the rolls rather than working it out from wall area, order the whole job from a single batch because colour drifts between print runs, and keep a spare roll in the house. Hangers will normally inspect and check the rolls before cutting into them, since most manufacturers will not entertain a complaint about paper that is already on the wall.

Wallpaper is an excellent early warning system and a poor remedy. Government guidance on damp and mould in the home separates four causes, and the distinction is the whole diagnosis. Condensation damp happens when moisture generated inside the home cools and condenses onto colder parts of the buildings, for example window frames, corners and low points on walls behind sofas or wardrobes. Penetrating damp is water that gets into the building from outside due to defects in the walls, roofs, windows or floors. Rising damp is moisture from the ground rising up through parts of the buildings in contact with the ground, which the same guidance notes is usually found in older properties and is often misdiagnosed. Traumatic damp comes from leaking waste and heating pipes, overflowing baths or sinks, burst pipes or defective water storage vessels inside the building.

The guidance is blunt about the shortcut: simply removing surface mould will not prevent the damp and mould from reappearing. Hanging fresh paper over a damp wall is the same shortcut with a better finish, and it usually fails faster than paint because the paste stays wet and feeds what is growing behind it. A paperhanger who declines to hang over a suspicious patch until the cause is traced is protecting your paper and your wall, not looking for extra work.

Stripping is disturbance, and disturbance is precisely what the asbestos rules exist to control. HSE states that asbestos may be part of any commercial or domestic building which was built or refurbished before the year 2000, that it was widely used until 1999 when it was banned, and it names textured decorative coatings, commonly referred to as Artex, among the materials that may contain it. Textured coatings turn up on British walls as well as ceilings, sometimes under later layers of paper. Under regulation 5 of the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 an employer must not undertake work liable to expose employees to asbestos unless the presence of asbestos has been properly assessed, or they assume that asbestos is present and that it is not chrysotile alone, and work accordingly.

Most textured coating work is non-licensed rather than unregulated, and the difference matters. HSE is explicit that all non-licensed and notifiable non-licensed work with asbestos needs a risk assessment and must be carried out with the appropriate controls in place, and that those carrying out the work must have had the correct level of information, instruction and training. The legal control limit still applies: regulation 2 of the same Regulations defines it as 0.1 fibres per cubic centimetre of air averaged over a continuous period of 4 hours. HSE also advises homeowners not to try to repair or remove asbestos materials themselves without training for non-licensed work, and points to the environmental health officer at your local authority or council for advice.

The second hazard is in the paint under the paper. Government guidance states that lead paint was common before the 1970s, that lead paint has not been used after 1992, and that prior to this UK paint may have contained up to 50% lead by weight. Crucially it also states that exposure is only likely if the paint is deliberately removed or sanded during redecoration, so intact paintwork left alone is a different proposition from the same paintwork attacked with an abrasive. Where old paint does have to come back, HSE says not to over heat leaded paint by using blow lamps or gas torches, to keep hot air guns and infrared equipment below 500 degrees Celsius, and points instead to chemical stripper, wet abrasive paper and a scraper, or on-tool extraction with an H or M class unit.

Not every wall wants paper, and the honest comparison is room by room. A chimney breast or a bedroom feature wall is the easiest case and the one where an expensive paper earns its keep, because the area is small and the wall is usually flat and dry. A bathroom is the hardest, because steam attacks seams and anything growing behind the covering is invisible until it has spread; extract ventilation matters more there than the specification of the paper. Kitchens, hallways and children's rooms take wipeable coverings simply because they get touched.

A stairwell deserves separate thought, because it is the one domestic paperhanging job with real access risk. HSE describes the Work at Height Regulations 2005 as aiming to prevent death and injury caused by a fall from height, says they apply to employers and to those who control work at height, and requires that work is properly planned, supervised and carried out by competent people using the right type of equipment. On a stairwell that generally means a proper platform or tower rather than a ladder footed on a stair tread, and it is a decision for the contractor to plan, not a line to negotiate downwards. If one stairwell quote is conspicuously cheaper than the others, ask what access each has allowed for before concluding anything.

Freshly hung paper needs the room left alone for a while. Keep the heating gentle and steady and resist the urge to open every window and force it dry, because drying the paste too quickly is what opens seams. Small lifted edges in the first weeks are usually re-fixed easily with a seam adhesive rather than being a sign of failure. Keep the spare roll, the batch number and a note of which wall it belongs to somewhere you will find them, because a patched repair from a different batch will not match under daylight.

When you want to compare paperhangers, LokalMatch takes the details once. You describe the room, the covering you have chosen or are considering, what is on the wall now, the age of the property and anything you already suspect about damp, a textured surface or old paintwork, and matched professionals covering your postcode contact you directly. The professionals pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not hang the paper, does not set prices and does not vet, rank or recommend anyone, so compare what each quote includes for stripping, making good and lining before you compare the headline figure.