Harold Howard is the owner of Harold Howard’s Painting Service, which is based in Columbia, Maryland, and serves Howard, Baltimore, Ann Arundel, Carroll, and Hartford counties. Among other services, such as drywall installation and both commercial and residential painting, his company puts up wallpaper. Here, he explains why it’s better to have a professional put up your wallpaper and describes the wallpaper-applying procedure.
For wallpaper application services, I always recommend calling a professional over doing the job yourself. If you want a polished look, with the wallpaper cut evenly and put up properly, a professional company such as ours is your best bet. While you could achieve the task of putting up wallpaper yourself, it would likely take longer. If you hire a professional, all the seams will match and all the corners will be in place. So when it’s time to take the wallpaper down, it won’t mess up the drywall behind it.
Another reason to call a professional to put up your wallpaper is that we have the proper tools, such as scissors, a razor blade, knives, an aligner to help cut the wallpaper straight (it looks kind of like a paper cutter), and a bucket for water. We also have materials such as special wallpaper primer (which is different from regular paint primer). It is applied to assure that wallpaper doesn’t go directly on the drywall and damage it.
When our customers call us for wallpaper application, we ask them to buy their own wallpaper and give it to us to use. There is a separate fee for the labor. It generally takes us less than a day to put up wallpaper in one room; of course, this depends on the room’s size.
To apply the wallpaper, we wet it down and apply a special glue, which we put in place with a long wallpaper brush, which in turn puts pressure on the surface. Most wallpaper already has an adhesive substance on it, however.
In case we make a mistake when applying the wallpaper, we buy a little more wallpaper than we need. If it hasn’t dried yet, we have plenty of time to take it off and fix it since it takes wallpaper about 24 hours to dry.
