William Morris wallpaper - Golden Lilly

Wallpapering and ants

I spent the day wallpapering our entranceway. Whenever I wallpaper I tell myself I’m never doing it again. But then a year or two later I’m back at it.

I really struggled with this one. It seemed an easy wall but the end result is bubbly. I’ve never had wallpaper bubble before and the only difference this time is I bought the paste from B&Q rather than using the Sanderson paste which is what I usually use. I’m not sure if that’s why. It’s disappointing as the wallpaper is expensive so I don’t really want to pull it down and redo it. I should have got a professional to do it.

Nevertheless it’s still an improvement on what we had which was peeling off and I decided to brighten things up with a change of colour on the wood panelling.

Here’s the before photo:

The entranceway with wallpaper stipped

Here’s the in progress photo:

Me cutting the edge off after having pasted the wallpaper
Me hanging wallpaper and struggling to do the corner

And here’s how far I got:

William Morris Golden Lilly wallpaper - looking up towards the stairs
William Morris Golden Lilly wallpaper - looking down towards the door
William Morris Golden Lilly wallpaper - looking at the corner of the wall

The wallpaper is William Morris Golden Lily.

I want to do the wall on the far side opposite this one but I’m a bit hesitant now given the bubbling issue. It needs a second coat of paint too.

Have I shared photos of Elizabeth’s ants recently? We filled their little habitat with several test tubes and they moved out of their old one and into one of the new ones. That was rather exciting. The queen has laid lots of eggs and they moved all the eggs one-by-one to the new test tube.

Elizabeth's founding ant colony
A close-up of the queen ant, 7 workers, and lots and lots of small white eggs

The eggs take 3-4 weeks to hatch and the larvae around another 5 weeks to mature. They really do make fascinating pets.

1 thought on “Wallpapering and ants”

  1. How do ants decide which test tube they want to be in? Is there a pattern?
    The wallpaper looks good, I can’t see the bubbles in the pictures. Only if I look hard, a bit at the bottom? Maybe not the same as wallpapering, but my friend described how difficult plastering is as, if you were doing a whole house, by the time you got to the last room, you might have become relatively competent at it. Maybe wallpapering is the same – many different variables that only experience can mitigate, as well as being physically hard work.

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