Repairing Wallcoverings Part One
The ASPA study program has one entire two-hour tape (Tape number 21) and parts of many others in our twenty-eight tape series dedicated exclusively to wallcovering patches and repairs. So it's not possible for one column or even a series of columns to show you everything I would like to share with you. But in this column I will start to tell you about some of the tools and tricks that help with this process. Hopefully, this series of columns on patches and repairs will get you going in the right direction.
The first rule that you must always bear in mind is to be inventive. With the tremendous variety of materials both past and present (not to mention those not yet invented), using imagination and creativity to make repairs look good is the key.
Repair can be anything from trying to glue back a few loose seams to any attempt at reattaching whole sheets of wallcovering which have fallen off the wall. The latter is really a job failure problem rather than a normal wear and tear repair.
You might be called to make a repair on an installation job you have done that has nothing to do with the way you did your job. I remember, many years ago a young man, upset with his mother, walked into a room minutes after I had finished the installation and slashed it with an old time beer opener. Before I got home she had called, and I was back the next morning to make repairs before the original job had even fully dried. The wallpaper was probably a great deal easier to fix than the young man's attitude!
Adhesives are an important part of any repair. You will find several types of tube and small container repair adhesives on the market that are great in certain situations but don't work at all in others. This again is because of the great variety of problems and products. It is important that you keep a variety on hand because you never know what you will run into.
One great touch up adhesive that you can prepare yourself is extra thick claybase. In the next few paragraphs I'm going to tell you how to make this handy adhesive. (For those of you with our tape installation series this process is actually shown on the last few minutes of tape twenty-one.)
Alicia's Repair Adhesive
I named this adhesive after my oldest daughter who was within a few days of entering school when I first used my imagination and creativity and came up with it. It is amazing the way the need to feed little mouths dependent on you can spur your imagination to new heights! Over the years both the adhesive and my daughter have made my work days easier and more worthwhile. I hope you can use it to make your repairs go easier so you will have more time (and money!) to spend with and on your family!
The first step in making Alicia's adhesive is to cut a piece of scrap woven back vinyl about a foot long. Skim coat the vinyl side of it with a good claybase adhesive using your broad knife to apply it just as if you were skim coating a wall with joint compound. Make this skim coat about 1/8th of an inch thick. Next use a blow dryer to remove some of the moisture. The trick here is to dry the adhesive so that it is as thick as possible without making it brittle and lumpy. The reason you want to do this no more than an 1/8th of inch thick (or even less) is because if you make it thicker the adhesive underneath won't dry out with your blow dryer and you'll have a real mess on your hands. When you finish with the blow dryer the claybase should be about the consistency of caulking or glazing compound.
Once thickened you can scrape the adhesive off the vinyl and place it in a butter tub or a large mouth plastic container. LABEL IT CAREFULLY AND BOLDLY. It is a good idea to keep this in a cool place (like your refrigerator) but you don't want anyone making a sandwich or icing a cake with this recipe!
Alicia's adhesive is incredibly strong and will do wonders against what we call "vinyl memory." Vinyl, as a raw material, whether it will be used for dishwashing gloves, vinyl wallcovering or automobile seats is made in longs sheets and rolled into a bulk roll. If for some reason it after your installation it becomes unattached from the wall it has a natural tendency to return to its original rolled up position...hence "vinyl memory." Depending on how long it has been loose from the wall vinyl wallcovering can be the most contrary stuff imaginable.
If you have a great deal of vinyl wallcovering to reattach you may want to fill an old empty caulking tube (after you have cleaned it thoroughly) with Alicia's adhesive. This allows you to disburse the adhesive further under the seam and more evenly than with a brush. You will also have much less chance of stretching or tearing your wallcovering.
CAUTION: If the wallcovering you are repairing is a thin white background paper or a vinyl coated paper this adhesive because of it's clay color can tone the covering causing the repair to look eternally wet. In this situation you might want to try thickening a good quality white premix. Experiment with different ones as some work better than others for this purpose. (If you like you can name that adhesive after one of your own children or grandchildren!)
Alicia's adhesive is also super for another very common problem and that is loose edges of wallcovering around the shower stall. This homemade adhesive really sticks it back and keeps it there for much longer than anything else I have ever purchased on the market.
Blow dryers
We used a blow dryer to make Alicia's adhesive but there are many other places you will find a blow dryer useful. Often times when you find yourself with the problem of regluing loose seams they seem to have shrunk. Warming the vinyl with the blow dryer will cause the wallcovering to relax and expand thus helping the seam to close back up. I prefer the blow dryer to a heat gun because there is less chance of overheating melting the product.
Another trick to bear in mind (if you don't have a blow dryer handy) and you are working with a paper or vinyl coated paper is to just use warm water on the seams. This will also help re-expand the covering and close up the seams.
In part two I'm going to discuss some additional repair tricks that I have found that really work. We will talk about how to make a repair in vinyl and some of the uses for a vinyl over vinyl (VOV) adhesive.
Click Here: Lesson Two Repairing Wallcoverings
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