Repairing Vintage Wallpaper with Inkjet Canvas

This is how I repaired/replaced some vintage wallpaper in our tiny bathroom.
While having new windows installed, we discovered termite and wood rot damage to the bathroom window frame & wall. The damage extended along the upper part of the wall so we needed to knock it out to replace the studs & frame. But this meant removing the lovely art nouveau wallpaper that was my favorite part of the bathroom. I shopped around and online, looking for vintage patterns or anything black & white that might match, but couldn’t find anything appropriate. It was the wall directly across from the doorway so it would have looked odd without wallpaper. Tile extends 2/3 up the wall & the section of wall was only about 4’ wide, so it wasn’t a large section. It was vinyl wallpaper, so I attempted carefully to scrape it off and save it. Of course that didn’t go as well as expected and I ended up with many tiny fragments.

The wallpaper had an open weave cloth backing. I began to tape together the fragments of wallpaper on the front side and then glued cheesecloth to the back to hold them together. I only had one section about 20”x30” that was too broken up to reuse.
I was shopping for photo paper for my husband when I came across canvas made for inkjet printers. I came up with the idea of printing the design on it (I had seen pages from an old Sears Catalog used as wallpaper) so I figured the canvas would paste up well and the texture matched the existing wallpaper very well. I began placing the better sections on the scanner and scanning into jpg format. I had to edit parts of the image to fill in the damaged areas. I was then able to print out 8 ½”x11” sections. Luckily the design of overlapping illustrations gave me lots of places to form seam between the small prints. Somehow the new window & frame ended up narrower than the original, so I also needed to create two small strips to border each side of the window. In one of my many art books I found an Aubrey Beardsley design that went nicely. I scanned & printed those out too.
Then I thought about it going up in a moist and steamy room and that the ink might not hold up. I tried painting some polyurethane on one of the scrap portions but the ink bled. I then started researching to see if there was a product made for sealing injet prints. There was, but at $20 dollars per can & only available online, I didn’t want to wait. So I ended up buying clear coat spray with UV protection. I tested it out on another scrap, let it dry and glued it to a scrap of drywall. Looked great. But when I pasted up the real pieces ink bled. I think I used too much glue and got it too wet from the under side, which I hadn’t sprayed. I wasn’t going to remove it and try again, not that big a section anyway. So if you try it, clear coat both sides before gluing & use the glue sparingly.
 

Renovation Existing Tile

When renovating a bathroom, most home improvement sites and books will recommend completely ripping out all the fixtures and tiles and updating everything. They say that you will usually recover the cost when you resell the house. That’s fine if you can actually afford the thousands of dollars in demolition and replacement. Many of us don’t have those resources. And with the current housing slump and home values having dropped dramatically, sinking thousands into a renovation may not pay off.
I have updated both the bathrooms in my home without replacing all of the tile. I have redone just portions of it. I did it myself, and it does involve some delicate precision and hard labor. I’m not sure tile contractors would like my approach either. Hiring someone to do this work may not be easy as they most likely feel it’s easier to tear it all out and then cover a clean flat wall.
Easy doesn’t always mean best for the environment. My approach is to preserve as much vintage tile as possible and to add as little as possible to the waste stream. Where does all that old tile end up? Probably a landfill. Maybe if it were being recycled for some other use, it wouldn’t bother me so much, but most of the time, you see large amounts of construction waste just packed up into dumpsters and trucked away.
Here’s what I did with the 1st renovation. We had broken tile on the windowsill, some edge tiles at the floor that were cracked, a broken ceramic wall mounted towel rack and worn out ceramic soap dish and toothbrush holders above the wall hung sink. After removing the sink, we also found holes through some tiles and cracks in others.
I loved the 50-year-old tan speckled tile but knew I probably wouldn’t be able to match it. The room had black edge tile, so I had to come up with a pattern to insert black tile to fill in the spaces where I removed the broken stuff. It required placing black tiles where the new towel bars would attach to the walls, black tiles on the new windowsill and a few rows of black behind the sink. It also involved preserving at least one tan tile to fill in a spot where one towel bar was removed. Getting tiles off in one piece is the trickiest part & mostly comes down to luck.
Here’s a few links on how to replace a broken tile…

http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/how-to/intro/0,,20051584,00.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_114958_replace-cracked-tile.html

perhaps I’ll post more about my own repair work at a later date as this is already getting too long winded.

Upcycled Bathroom Heater

We recently renovated our main bathroom. I chose not to demolish the existing tile (unlike most major renovators would recommend). First of all, I liked the tile, secondly most of it was still in great condition and thirdly, I prefer to add as little as possible to the waste stream. The problem with preserving 60 year old tile is the fact that they no longer make it and new tiles are not available.
We had an old recessed wall heater just below the window. It was no longer working and with new central air and heat, it was no longer needed. But since it was recessed into the wall removing it would have left a hole that would have required new tiles to cover. Since it was located on the wall right next to the toilet and the center opening provided a good size, I decided to convert it to a magazine rack. I removed it from the wall and unscrewed the face from the part that held the heater coil. I then cut some pieces of craft wood to line the rear and sides of the recess in the wall. I stained them to match the dark wood color we were using for our sink vanity. I then built a wedge shape out of some more wood and stained & polyurethaned it. I screwed it on through the same holes that had held the rear part of the heater on. I also stain some strips of wood to go behind the beautiful cut outs, because the edges of my inside frame now showed through . I chose to leave the original label and toggle switch on the face to give it some character. It works great and I didn’t have to add any more problems to my tile renovation (more on the subject in a future blog).