Accent Wall with Peel & Stick Wallpaper
When you live in an apartment (or really any home for that matter), your area of design focus continually rotates as time goes on. We first moved in nearly four years ago, and at the time, I had a blast painting the accent wall in the dining room a light yellow chevron. It took a lot of patience, measuring, and skill, and I was really happy with the result. Cut to 3.5 years later, and that yellow starts to look blah and outdated to me. I knew it needed to change. Also, we’d like to move out soon, and one of the contingencies of us being allowed to paint in the first place was that by move out, the walls had to be back to Swiss Coffee White. So, whatever design decision I made, I knew white was going to be the base color.
Thankfully, I’m really getting behind the fresh, minimalist black/white color palette that’s currently swirling around Southern California. (In my 6-Step Mirror post, I stained my hutch to black, and switched out the knobs to start to capture this whole vibe.) Me being me, I like to have whimsy and individuality come through in my space. Enter in this amazing Wall Pops Gray Woods Peel and Stick wallpaper from Amazon.
If you haven’t tried applying removable wallpaper, have no fear - it’s SO easy! From start to finish, this wall probably took me less than an hour. And when it’s time to move, it peels right off with no residue underneath. Really impressive to me as a renter who also wants cool design elements in her home. Check out this snippet of a time-lapse video I made:
FULL DISCLAIMER - in the spirit of total honesty, I want to share that some pieces of the wallpaper started to come unstuck after a few days. I have no idea why some sections are staying on with no problem, and others are not. I made sure to thoroughly clean the wall with 409 pre-application. I ended up getting a Gorilla Glue spray to help keep everything in place, and so far, that’s been working perfectly. Not sure how much that will effect the removal process, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
At the end of the day, I’m really happy with how my dining room looks. And as my fiance said, “wow that’s really striking!” (I hope that’s a good thing…) If we owned our property rather than rented, I would probably just go for real wallpaper, especially in areas like the bathroom, where any moisture would surely make the peel and stick fall off immediately. Anyways, I hope your wallpaper journey is a little smoother after reading this. Did you have the same un-sticking issues that I did? What do you think of my accent wall’s transformation?
Stay tuned for the final piece of the dining room puzzle - re-sanding the table and staining it to black + new chairs!
