I know it sounds a little crazy, but after painstakingly removing five different wallpapers from this house, we’re actually considering putting some up again. I even hinted at the idea in a previous post about the nursery mobile.
When we first envisioned the built-ins, we pictured creating an accent between them—either with color, pattern, or some wall treatment (at one point we even talked about a planked wall). Those ideas faded a bit after we finished the built-ins and realized they would hold a lot of items, so we didn’t want to overload the space above the crib. Still, neither of us could shake the desire to add some kind of accent somewhere in the room. One night while browsing wallpaper options for the showhouse, this pattern caught John’s eye.
Without checking with me (cue the outraged gasps), John ordered a sample of this one and its darker version for $5 each. With tax and shipping the total was $13—an amount that would either earn him a sour look or make him a hero.
My sour look wasn’t about the money so much as my memory of the painful experience of stripping wallpaper. But when John mentioned that the samples were removable wallpaper, I relaxed. I liked the pattern too: it feels like something that could grow with the baby rather than read as fleetingly “babyish.” Whether John became a hero is still TBD.
The samples arrived a couple of weeks later and were large enough to get a good feel for the scale. They also revealed a subtle linen-like texture in the gray tones that neither of us had noticed online—a pleasant surprise.
We ran upstairs and taped the samples on the wall to see how they looked in the room. John, getting braver it seems, put them up on the wall with the bike prints. Since the built-in wall felt too busy to change, he thought the bike wall might be a better spot. Excuse the terrible phone photo.
I photographed the taped-up sample so I could mock up a full-wall version in Photoshop. I layered that photo over a picture of the full wall, resized the overlaid wallpaper sample until the pattern matched scale, and lowered the opacity to align the pattern more easily. Once the scale looked right, I restored full opacity and manually tiled the wallpaper rectangle to fill the entire wall area.
To make the mock-up realistic, I cut out around existing objects like frames, doors, and the changing table so the wallpaper appears to sit behind them. That helped us visualize how the finished wall would look with the room’s elements in place.
We also tested the darker sample by adjusting the color in the mock-up, but both of us agreed the lighter version read better in the space.
To see how the accent would interact with an adjacent plain wall, I used the same technique on a larger photo of the room. The colors in the mock-up aren’t perfect—the curtains look a bit neon—but it was useful for picturing the layout and confirmed the lighter wallpaper wouldn’t clash with the existing paint.
I wasn’t completely sold on the bike wall, so I also mocked up the wallpaper on the crib wall to revisit our original idea. After comparing both versions, we both leaned toward the bike wall—the crib wall felt too busy with all the items on the built-ins, the mobile, and the patterned crib skirt.
Just for fun I tested a bold green above the crib to see if a solid pop of color would work. The Photoshop job looked a bit flat and we didn’t love it in the room.
I also tried a charcoal shade that might balance the chair and other neutrals in the room. That option earned an “eh, not bad” reaction from both of us—it looked nice with the white crib and the mobile.
Adding another idea to the mix, a reader named Annie sent a mock-up showing chunky painted stripes behind the crib. We love a striped wall, and her suggestion gave us pause and another possibility to consider.
For now we’re letting the options simmer, but we’d love input. Would you wallpaper the bike art wall? The removable option makes it a low-commitment experiment. Or would you prefer a painted solid—green or charcoal—or painted stripes behind the crib? Or should we leave the room as is? We’re excited by the chance to add another layer of interest—especially since most elements in the room are neutral—but we still want the space to feel playful and cozy, not overwhelming. What would you do?
VOTING ON THIS POLL HAS CLOSED
