Julian Cassell's DIY Blog

Painting a feature wall in your home uses the same basic techniques employed for painting any wall. However, it’s worth taking into account a few little extra considerations, just to ensure you get a top quality finish. Feature walls are used to add an extra dimension, or a bit more impact to a room’s colour scheme. As a result, there is a tendency to use accent colours, which are often bolder, darker or even brighter than the paint colour applied to the other walls in the room.  read more »

Having the right wallpapering tools, not only makes hanging wallpaper much easier, but also ensures you will get a better, and longer lasting finish. You’ll need a fair few items from your household toolkit such as a spirit level and stanley knife, and in the guide below, as well as highlighting a few points about such tools in relation to wallpapering, I’ll also point out my preferences with some extra pieces of kit that are specifically designed for all wallpapering projects. read more »

How many rolls of wallpaper you need is always a necessary calculation for wallpapering a room, and you’ll find many versions of different ‘wallpaper calculators’ online. In my guide ‘Wallpapering a room’ I show one fairly mathematical technique, but unless the room or rooms are very complicated or unusual in design, I tend to go for a far simpler option that I’ve detailed below. To make any calculation, you need to know what size of pattern repeat your choice of wallpaper has, as well as the dimensions of the roll. read more »

Wallpaper border frames are an alternative way of adding interest to a wall surface. You can use them to ‘outline’ a wall, or to create panels, or even to ‘frame’ paintings and pictures. The trickiest aspect of making a border frame is mitre joining the pattern in each corner, and you’ll find that some designs will be far more suitable to making this join than others. The following sequence shows how to make a mitre join when creating a wallpaper border frame. read more »

Lining walls prior to painting or wallpapering them is a subject that can stir up a bit of controversy with many decorators as well as DIY enthusiasts. For issues about why to use lining paper in the first place, check out my guide ‘Using lining paper’, but in this guide, I want to concentrate on some simple application rules as well as the reasons for cross lining, where the lining paper is hung horizontally, and vertical lining, where the paper is hung ceiling to floor, just like wallpaper. read more »