Peel & Stick Wallpaper?
 

We moved into a new house when I had 6 weeks to go in baking my pandemic baby, so we didn't even set up her "nursery" until she was a year old, instead we had the whole kit and caboodle in our bedroom with us until we were ready to boot her and get our own space back, and when we moved her, we just moved all her stuff and toddler-proofed the room.

This means now at 3 years old I'm finally ready to make it into an actual kid's bedroom. I'm willing to redo the room in 10 years when she suddenly hates unicorns or whatever but I want to make choices now that make that easier down the line.

Is peel-and-stick wallpaper worth it? It seems like it's almost as big a pain to put up as traditional wallpaper, but is pulling it down going to do the same type of damage anyway?

I used peel-and-stick wallpaper in my kids’ rooms, and it was so much easier to put up than traditional wallpaper — no glue or anything, and it wasn’t messy, and you can also reposition it if needed. When we updated my oldest’s room a few years later, taking it down was super easy, and it didn’t damage the walls at all.

It’s not completely hassle free, though. The key is making sure the walls are smooth and clean before applying it, and maybe giving them a fresh coat of paint if needed, so that way, any adhesive residue will wipe off easily. And then, unlike traditional wallpaper, there wasn’t really any scraping involved, it just peeled right off. I’d definitely use it again for spaces I knew we’d want to update in a few years.

That's a good tip - we'll probably be painting, then doing one wall with a fairly busy pattern. So we'll paint the whole room, let it dry, then put up the paper.

Please consider posting a photo! Good luck with the project.

Ditto.

I'll try to remember! Hoping to work on it over Martin Luther King, Jr. Weekend.

Do the walls need to be smooth? Ours are textured, and when our son was little we got him a huge, super-cool Fathead sticker of Woody from Toy Story for his wall. Sadly, one day, it just peeled right off. It seemed that our walls were too textured for it.

Yeah, they should be. Textured walls can be a pain for stuff like that. I mean, I’ve seen decals and things just peel right off because the surface isn’t smooth enough. I feel like peel-and-stick wallpaper would probably do the same thing. I guess you could sand or prime the walls first, maybe? But that would kind of take away the whole easy part of it.

I wonder if peel-and-stick wallpaper can be applied over peel-and-stck wallpaper.