The Seam-Saving Hack Designers Rely On When Wallpapering Ceilings And Walls

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Painting walls can be a long, involved, and messy process. Once you've taken time to pick out your new colors, you'll have to prepare the room by covering your furniture and floors, applying painter's tape to the edges of each area, fixing any surface-level damage, cleaning the walls (especially if there's mold), and then applying a coat or two of primer before you finally put up one or more coats of paint — with time to dry between each pass. That's not even considering the most beginner-friendly DIY accent walls, which can add many steps to planning and execution. Papering over the walls might seem like an easier solution at first blush, but it's going to involve a similar amount of primer and introduce its own unique problems. For example: what happens when the wallpaper pattern you've chosen doesn't align when moving from the walls to the ceiling?

Pattern matching can be tough in the best of circumstances, whether there's a finite number of items within the wallpaper's motif or the entire thing is one repeating geometric pattern. Luckily, there is a hack you can lean on as a simple solution. If you line the edges of the room with something in a complementary color, it will break up the pattern to avoid mismatches while adding more visual interest to the design.

This wallpaper hack to match your walls and ceiling is essentially an extension of that Victorian-age design staple: crown molding. In fact, adding any number of decorative wall moldings to your home redesign could be an apt solution to your pattern matching woes (and you can also install baseboard trim to frame the entire wall while you're at it).

There are other options you can try too. For example, if your preferred wallpaper brings gift wrapping to mind, you can really lean into that comparison by trimming the corners of your room with ribbon or lace. Wallpaper is impermanent by design — so long as you put in the work of priming the wall rather than applying paper directly onto plaster or sheetrock, you should be able to glue or staple accoutrements into those corners without worrying about lasting damage. However, another creative solution could be buying rubber edge guards from storefronts like Amazon. These are usually meant to childproof pointed edges, but could just as easily be turned around to line a concave corner for more aesthetic purposes. You want to be careful not to overwhelm your room with too many details, especially given textured wallpaper is making a modern comeback, but this corner-lining design hack is one of the best ways to help your interior design stand out.