THAT thicker groove, every 5 feet or so, is ever so slightly visible under the wallpaper.
Where these pieces “join,” there is a slightly larger groove than the normal part of the paneling. So, I never had looked very closely at our paneling, but apparently paneling is installed in pieces that are several feet wide. Just for absolute disclosure though, there is one teeny tiny portion of paneling that is visible under the wallpaper. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, it’s now been nearly 18 months since having this work done, and it still looks so fantastic. So, three days later the contractors showed back up to paint the wallpaper! The instructions on the wallpaper said to give it 72 hours to dry before applying paint.
I think this was to help in case the wallpaper shrunk a bit as it dried. After the wallpaper was up, the installers decided to cover the seams of the wallpaper with a little bit of caulking. I’m not sure how necessary this step is, but just thought I’d share it in case others are considering the same option. Even before the wallpaper was painted, our basement looked like an entirely new room. It was an incredible transformation to witness. There are a lot more “before” photos in our intro post, but here are some of the paneled walls again, just for reference: And it still looks just as fantastic as when it went in! So, as of the time of writing this, we’re now 17 months past the wallpaper installation. It’s worth noting that we had this work done in September 2015. He took some measurements of the room and told us how many rolls of wallpaper to buy. We decided to proceed with this contractor. ** “Wow,” he said, “this is great stuff.” We could immediately tell that it covered the grooves just fine. He wet the wallpaper in our laundry sink, waited a few moments, and then attached a small strip to the wood paneled bar. If it didn’t look nice, it wouldn’t make a difference since the bar would be gone in a few days anyway. Since, as part of our renovation, we were planning on ripping out our basement bar which also had wood paneling, he offered to put up a piece of wallpaper right there on the bar. He said that he had never worked with paintable wallpaper, but he was willing to give it a try.