Give Your Walls a Crackled Look with Ordinary Wallpaper

Wallpaper has been around for many decades, and over the years they’ve created new designs of wallpaper with marbling, foil and even velvet, but those new wallpaper designs cost big money. You can purchase inexpensive wallpaper, and use a new papering technique, to give your rooms a unique crackled look that’s very elegant.

The wallpaper technique is as simple as tearing sheets of paper. Actually, that’s exactly what you do. Tear pre-pasted wallpaper into pieces to prepare for hanging. Shapes shouldn’t be calculated – just rip some pieces off the roll. Try to keep pieces at least as large as a dinner plate, or you’ll spend many more hours hanging it than necessary.

Rip some pieces into strips, others into random odd shapes. Rip a large pile of the pieces before beginning the job, or rip all the wallpaper into pieces first, if you prefer. Begin anywhere in the room (there goes the regular wallpapering tip of starting in a corner), by dipping the piece in water, allowing the excess water to drip away, then hang the piece on the wall.

Begin pasting more pieces, all over the wall section, slightly overlapping each previous piece of wallpaper. This tear-and-paste technique makes it easier to hang wallpaper over the normal technique of dipping huge pieces in water and balancing them while climbing ladders and keeping the wallpaper from rolling. You can begin putting torn pieces of wallpaper all over the walls of the room, but it’s easier to stay focused if you concentrate on one wall section before moving to another.

Obviously, the wallpaper you choose for this project is important. If you choose stripes or large dots you’re liable to get a confusing mess that’s not attractive at all. Choosing something in a solid color, a marbled tone, or even a foiled design works well, although pin stripes in pastel hues works okay for some rooms.

Don’t be afraid to place wallpaper pieces over ones you’ve already pasted. Just don’t put layer after layer on, giving the wall a bulky look in some places. And be careful when you tear the wallpaper pieces that you don’t rip them in a way that peels the printed area off of the white background, leaving huge white pieces that won’t look good on the wall.

When the wallpaper job is completed you’ll be impressed with how textured your walls look – something like cracked leather or crackled paint, depending upon the wallpaper chosen. The look is unique and very different from just hanging ordinary wallpaper. You’ll love the ease of hanging the paper so much, that even though it’s time-consuming, you’ll want to do this wallpaper technique in several rooms of your home.