Whatever happened to ready-pasted wallpaper?

[Bert Coules]

I haven't had to hang wallpaper for a fair old time, and since then haven't really even looked at the stuff until very recently, when I was buying some textured white. For this particular job I wasn't expecting to use it myself, but I was struck by the absence of the sort of ready-pasted, soak-in-a-trough papers that used to be so widespread. Compared to the faff of working with pasting tables, paste, brushes, long folded-over sheets and the like, they were a doddle - was there a specific reason why they fell out of favour?

Bert

[ss]

Just guessing thats its to do with demand as probably more walls are painted nowadays rather than papered.

[Bert Coules]

I wondered about that, but (for example) our local B&Q has a pretty vast stock of wallpapers, which would be surprising if demand overall had dropped. But I didn't see a single ready-pasted version there.

Bert

[Andrew Gabriel]

I suspect there is a drop in wallpaper use, but more significant, there's a drop in people willing to try things like papering, and the ready-pasted version was aimed very much at the DIY market.

[michael adams]

Ready pasted wallpaper was a solution looking for a problem.

The beauty of using ordinary wallpaper paste is that as messy as it is at the time - you can splosh it around everywhere, rehang any pieces that are crooked - get paste all over the place - then just wipe off any surplus/ splashes with a damp cloth and as soon as its dried no-one would ever know. Even if your walls aren't properly sized and so soak up the paste, there's no problem, you just splosh on some more.

Ready pasted paper had none of these advantages, and I'll bet very few people pasted entire rooms with it without having to buy a sneaky packet of cold water paste on the side or made up some flour paste, just to tack back the odd edge here and there.

michael adams

...

[Percy]

On Sat, 1 Sep 2012, "Bert Coules" writ:

Replaced by "Paste the Wall" papers.

[Bert Coules]

Thanks to everyone for the new replies. That's an interesting thought about paste-the-wall papers and one that hadn't occurred to me at all.

Bert