If there’s one recent design trend that has captured my imagination it’s the triumphant resurgence of wallpaper.
For so long, “wallpaper” felt like a dirty word: a sticky plague dragging down resale value and trapping interiors in unattractive, yellowed time capsules. Like cornflower blue border circling my mom’s country kitchen, these styles did not age well, and in fact made it impossible to change up your style without a serious commitment to the scraping, peeling, and wall repair involved with removal.
(I also think my mom’s wallpaper had little white hearts and maybe geese? What a hold the country aesthetic had on 90s suburban moms.)
But now! Today’s wallpaper has risen like a phoenix, shedding its grandma image with a younger, fresher rebrand that makes it easy to add color and pattern to any room.
I LOVE WALLPAPER! It’s so fun, and whoever invented the removal peek/stick formulation is a modern-day saint. During Covid, I treated myself to a few rolls of a vibrant, playful pattern I’d been eying since before I bought this house for my first floor half bath. It was a quick, relatively easy project (minus the part where I had to straddle a toilet to smooth out wall bubbles) but for only one wall of the tiniest powder room I spent $200.
So, even though I love the look, ease, and basically everything about wallpaper, I haven’t been successful in adding it to other rooms due to cost. It adds up so quickly! I keep trying to find a little pocket of my home where wallpaper wouldn’t add up to hundreds of dollars but spoiler alert—it doesn’t exist.
Which brings me to today’s topic. My very weird primary bedroom is also my office, with one little nook big enough for a desk and not much else. As a converted attic, the room is all angles, with ceiling lines dipping high and low, left and right. Playing up the slanted edges with wallpaper felt like the perfect way to add some whimsy and inspiration to my work day; I landed on a starry sky theme to hang over my desk and pair with the rainbow mural defining the sleeping area.
I searched and searched for sophisticated constellation patterns that wouldn’t look like my 9-year-old self finally got her wish for a glow-in-the-dark star set.
But everything was either too juvenile or too bohemian and all around too expensive! For less than a 60-square-foot area, I estimated a wallpapered ceiling at over $600, with much of that material ending up in the trash due to all the angles.
I couldn’t justify that so—you guessed it!—a new DIY project was born!
But how? Even after my successful rainbow mural, I didn’t hate myself enough to paint a complicated pattern upside down. Thankfully, inspiration hit while browsing a Paper Source sidewalk sale where I found rolls of gold contact paper for $2/each. The paper had a nice sheen (dare I say, starry?!?) that could help reflect more light and interest into an inherently dark space. I already owned a few star-shaped hole punches from my scrapbooking days, so couldn’t I just… design my own constellations? How hard could it be?
(“How hard could it be” may be the most dangerous string of words in my vocabulary, unknowingly (though I should know better by now!!!) getting me into serious clusters from which there is no escape.)
It started out great. I enthusiastically punched a massive pile of stars, covering my desk in gold. In addition to two different star sizes, I also cut straight strips to connect the “dots”. I produced what I thought was an obscene number of stars—surely enough to cover most of the ceiling—and began peeling and sticking shapes to the wall.
I didn’t have a design plan other than achieving a general starry sky look. Initially I copied real constellations, adding Orion, Cassiopeia, and my zodiac sign (Scorpio), but I quickly burned through the most recognizable ones and started making up my own. Yet I still had SO MUCH EMPTY CEILING.
Turns out, when your stars are really small, they don’t take up much space! Which means your attempt to outsmart wallpaper will take exponentially longer than you expected. My work time was split between adding constellations and punch punch punching more stars. Every time I’d run out, I’d think, again? Really?!
This project stretched on for days… weeks… months. Five months to be exact. This was due in part to me feeling extremely over it at various points, not wanting to spend another hour punching and sticking yet barely making progress.
And then, just when I was getting to peak “I’ve made horrible life choices” mode, I started running out of contact paper, and since I bought my original stash on clearance, I couldn’t just go buy more. PERFECT. Now I had to start reworking the existing design, moving stars around to better fill the space. (It’s almost as if… planning ahead would have helped!)
Eventually, I got to the place where I am today: a ceiling that is 93% covered in shimmering stars and 7% fading into the black hole of “I can’t do this anymore.” And you know what? It works just fine! The gold paper captures the light beautifully at different points of the day, and the starry sky pairs dreamily with the rainbow.
Do I recommend this approach? Lol NO. The project became a cage match between the upfront cost of wallpaper vs. my time and stubbornness—I was the ultimate loser. While I do like the final result and receive a ton of compliments via Zoom (the stars act as a great video call backdrop), I should have just saved my pennies to invest in wallpaper.
Total project cost: $4
Total sanity cost: unknown
From the desk of Roy G. Biv
🌈 Which is your favorite dipper: Big or Little?
🌈 What’s the most frustrating home project you’ve endured?
🌈 Should I bother finishing this project or just take the 93% as a win?
Orion"s belt is my fav constellation as it was the 1st I could actually see.
Love your night sky in your room! Simple isn't the way your mind works, so beware Todd! More "easy" projects ahead.
My worst home project? Covering a burgundy paint in the bedroom. How many effing coats of the premium primer + colored guaranteed 1 coat? A heck of a lot more than 1!
One more thing. . . Wallpaper? Your bathroom is so bright and cheery! Maybe your blog can get my design mindset a bit less "boring and safe" like our bathroom designer called me. You up fir the challenge, sis?
How hard can it be she says? Hearing this all the time, my answer generally is “it’s gonna be hard”. Yet the response is always we’re doing it anyway. I’m going to remember this article from now on.
Love you