How to Hang Wallpaper Border in the Bathroom

Wallpaper border can add pizazz to a room. In small spaces like bathrooms, it will draw the eye up and make the room appear larger.
All rolls of border come with instructions, of course. But they are awfully basic instructions, and there are some useful professional tips to make the job come out better. Bathrooms can be particularly challenging because of the high humidity and glossier walls, so extra care will pay off in the long run.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Take a good look along the top of your walls. Clean the walls with a mild ammonia cleaner to remove soap and spray residue. If there are any cracks, even hairline ones, caulk them. Scrape off paint drips and bumps because wallpaper border is quite thin and imperfections will show through.

2. Although wallpaper border generally comes pre-pasted, it may not hold up well in a bathroom's high humidity. In addition, I recommend using thinned-down wallpaper paste as a backup. Mix it to the consistency of thick paint, and apply it to the wall before you hang each section of border. Then wipe all the excess off.

3. The trickiest part of hanging wallpaper border is getting the pattern to match up, and sometimes it's impossible. Start in the least obvious corner. Usually, this is the corner above the door, people don't pay much attention to it.

Tips & Warnings

• If you need to hold up the border and have run out of hands, use a pin to attach it to the wall. The hole is tiny and won't show.
• Don't throw away leftover pieces of border--you never know when they will come in handy.
• If your bathroom ceiling and walls need to be painted, now is the time to do it. It's much trickier when you have to work around a border after the fact.

Resources

• General wallpaper border tips