Wallpaper

I think wallpaper will really make a few of my rooms gorgeous. Can you tell me how to hang it? What are some of the most important steps when hanging wallpaper? Are there special tools one uses? I will get you started, but I urge you to look around for books, videos or DVDs that really explain the wallpapering process. You will need these basic tools: Assemble a tape measure, a 4-foot level, a 4-inch flexible putty knife, a paint roller and roller pan, a 2-inch paintbrush, a stepladder, a snap-blade razor knife, a smoothing brush and a large table or flat working surface.

Q: I've long been bothered by the 8-foot-high ceiling in my bedroom, which seems much too low for this otherwise generously sized space. At last I've decided to do something about it by redoing the room. My plan is to introduce floral wallpaper and painted furniture, but I wonder whether that will have much of a visual effect in regard to the ceiling's height. What do you think?A: The combination you're contemplating won't, by itself, do much to change perception of the room's proportions.

The Calvert Street home of Shaun Carrick and Ron Griffin is a house in a permanent state of decorating flux. To walk through it is to bask in a palette of rich colors and styles brought in from numerous travels to places ranging from India to Egypt, from rural Pennsylvania to San Francisco. Make no mistake, the house is no souvenir shop for high-priced trinkets from foreign lands. Sometimes, the influence might be as obvious as a contemporary Indian tapestry framed to dazzle visitors by the front door.

We live in a comfortable but not very elegant wooden clapboard house. We're considering a spruce-up for the master bath. Along with old-fashioned white fixtures, it has rose-painted walls and a white ceramic tile floor.All that you may need to do is to install a good-looking wallpaper treatment and perhaps a narrow shelf running the width of one wall. The photo suggests the cosmetic improvement that can result from these two simple alterations.The shelf is primarily a utilitarian addition.

Home furnishings on the market these days can drive you buggy.Take one of the designs of artist/designer Helen Verin. She gets her inspiration from some of the darndest places."

There's a big coverup going on. It's not in politics or sports. It has nothing to do with religion. What makes it different from most coverups is that there's nothing hush-hush about it. It may even be happening in your own home.And it has everything to do with the new revolution in wall covering.The wall covering patterns that have long been around -- florals, geometrics, stripes -- are being freshly interpreted. However, the splashiest news is the new wall coverings, with the looks most often associated with paint.

You were born with a painter's cap on your head and a roller in your hand. You can refinish an old bureau with the skill of a Homer Formby. You know your way around stencils and faux finishes. You've refinished your pine floors and still had time left over to run up some balloon shades for the windows.Why, then, does the very notion of wallpapering send you running for the Yellow Pages?Even staunch do-it-yourselfers tend to conjure up images out of Laurel and Hardy movies when they contemplate the job: impossibly long strips of paper peeling off the walls and entangling the hapless paperhanger, paste buckets upending at inopportune moments, air bubbles with minds of their own. That sort of thing.

I really didn't need the red splat on my ceiling or the dime-sized drops of deep, deep crimson dripping onto the food cabinet to figure out that my plan to scrape the kitchen walls bare had gone terribly awry. After all, I had nasty clumps of paper and glue congealing in my hair. A slimy blue goo covered my hands, clothes and shoes. The kitchen looked like an angry tornado had just blown through for a disturbing visit. It was plain to see that things weren't going well. But it wasn't until I saw the blood shooting out of my right hand like a small, scary geyser that I finally thought, maybe, just maybe, I should have done some reading and developed a game plan before launching what I thought would be a quick and easy wallpaper removal project - not doing that is exactly the point where I went wrong.

If you count Paleolithic people's drawings on the walls of caves, wallpaper is hundreds of thousands of years old. But it's always new. "Wallpaper particularly is a place where people can express their personal passions," says Linda Newman Brown, spokesman for Eisenhart, of Hanover, Pa., which has been producing wallpaper since 1937. The trend today is eclectic, she says, comparing home design with haute couture: No longer do designers impose their fashions on the masses. "Trends used to start at the top and trickle down to the masses.

I've just moved to a new house and have taken along most of the furniture from my old place. The dining-room pieces, which are in an 18th-century style, don't look so great in the new setting. The floor is dark oak, and the walls and woodwork have been painted white. How can I give the room some character and warmth?The room will look better if you add pattern and color. The best way to achieve that in a setting filled with 18th-century-style furniture is by applying a decorative wallpaper above chair-rail height.