Leftover paint after a home renovation is usually just nuisance junk. If you’re redoing your walls, you can save the paint for a refresh. But what to do with wallpaper?
Despite appearances, the material with which we cover the walls can be disposed of in other ways than just giving it to the landfill.
There are certainly many more, but we decided to focus on the simplest, and least involved solutions. Here are some uses for the scraps left over from covering your walls with wallpaper.
Lining drawers and boxes with larger wallpaper scraps not only improves their aesthetics – it also makes cleaning up easier. Once you’ve removed all the trinkets from the garbage cans, all you have to do is carefully pull out the material and shake off the dust, clippings and other small debris into the garbage can. A drawer clean, and we spent two minutes doing it without involving a vacuum cleaner.
Wallpaper can also protect the inside of a drawer or box from stains – instead of being embedded in the plywood or wood, the spill will soak into the material. All that’s left to do is replace the stained piece with a new one – the furniture remains untouched. This minimizes the damage from accidental spills.
If several patterns of wallpaper were used in the apartment, the clippings are bound to be more, in different shapes and sizes. This makes it difficult to find a role for them other than colorful waste. However, how about a collage created just from these colorful trash? Combined in an aesthetic whole, framed, the clippings can create a unique decoration that will be the envy of fans of contemporary art.
You can also create several panels on polystyrene or cork bases (you can also invest and, for example, buy a professional painting canvas already stretched on the frame, but then be prepared for higher costs and heavier weight), and treat them as a multi-segment wall decoration, which you can change depending on your mood. Are you bored with your current interior but don’t want to do a big renovation? Replace the panels and change the look of the whole wall, without tearing it off and repainting!
Like the previous one, this sub-item will appeal a bit more to fans of handicrafts. Wallpaper is a thick material that can be used to reinforce and at the same time decorate any cardboard organizers, containers or other DIY products. Covering places of gluing or not very aesthetic cardboard brown, at the same time will ensure the consistency of the accessory with the interior design.
The smaller the piece of wallpaper, the harder it is to find a use for it. However, even the offcuts can be used in decorating small items, such as bookmarks or a business card holder.
Additionally, smaller wallpaper scraps can be stiffened and inserted as organizer dividers, rolled and used as a ring stand, or pierced and made into an earring holder inside a jewelry container.
If you have a school-aged child, you can use larger pieces of thin wallpaper to drape over her notebooks and textbooks – if you think the wallpaper pattern will embarrass your child, fold the cover with the pattern inward, and treat the top (and thus the underside of the wallpaper) as a backing for any decorating you want on the protected book
A wallpaper wrap is more durable than a paper one, and it reduces the use of plastic counterparts, which are certainly a much less eco-friendly alternative.
And finally, hand-decorated covers mean that no one at school will have textbooks draped so coolly!
If you’ve got furniture that needs refreshing, it’s worth investing a bit of time in washing it, sanding off any remaining varnish… and then painting and wallpapering it. It’s a bit time consuming, but a simple and effective way to transform your furnishings
Again, you can use wallpaper scraps by choosing a patchwork decoration or layering pieces with the same pattern on top of each other. On a smaller, uneven space, for example, the legs of a chair and so no one will see the place of joining, everyone will be busy admiring the originality of the furniture!
