This was my first time doing wallpaper, and the difficulty wasn’t bad. If you want to do small wallpaper repairs, this might be useful as a reference. (You really only need a utility knife and a straight edge.)
What I Wanted to Repair
We bought our house used. Originally there was a small storage shelf installed above the bathroom door. We removed the shelf to clean up the look — but where the shelf had been mounted, the original (older) wallpaper was now exposed (visible color/texture mismatch with the surrounding wall, in the photos below).
So the goal: patch-replace those exposed strips so they blend in.
“Chotto Kabegami” (Quick Wallpaper) Patch Panels
For the repair I’m using Lintec Commerce’s “Chotto Kabegami” — a peel-and-stick patch panel.
I picked one with color/texture closest to the surrounding wall at the home improvement store. It comes with two 30 cm × 30 cm sheets per package (~500 yen).
It has double-sided tape on the back — cut to size, peel, stick.
The Repair
Starting with this section.
The exposed strip has an irregular shape, which makes it tedious to cut the patch panel to match — so I’ll trim the exposed area to a simple rectangle first.
Using a straight edge as a guide, I cut along the blue arrows in the photo below to clean up the area into a simple shape (and removed the old peeling wallpaper).
The bottom edge I’m leaving for now — I’ll trim that later by cutting the new and old wallpaper together.
Cut the patch panel to roughly fit. (For the bottom edge, I cut a few cm bigger — I’ll trim it precisely later.)
Peel only the top half of the release liner and stick the top edge in place.
Top half stuck:
Now for the bottom edge: the patch panel is overlapping the old wallpaper. Lay a straight edge along the line and cut through both layers at once with a utility knife.
Now the new and old wallpapers share an exact, matching cut line.
Peel off the cut-off old wallpaper underneath, then peel the rest of the patch panel’s release liner and stick the panel down.
That section is patched — looks pretty clean.
Now the strip above the bathroom door. This one’s just a simple rectangle — cut the patch panel to match and stick.
For the bottom edge here I again did the “double-layer cut” trick — cut new and old wallpaper together with a utility knife.
Last section repaired the same way.
Done!
Up close you can see the seam, and the color isn’t a perfect match, but at normal viewing distance it doesn’t bother me.
True to the product name (“chotto” = a little / a quick one), this is great for small wallpaper patches. The peel-and-stick adhesive is much easier to deal with than wet glue.
<Update>
Unrelated to this article: I tried doing my own fusuma (sliding paper door) re-papering recently and it didn’t go well… fusuma covers a much larger area, and the glue is the wet kind (not double-sided tape) — same brand (Lintec Commerce) makes a peel-and-stick fusuma version too, but I used the wet-glue version. The result had wrinkles. Higher difficulty than wallpaper patching.
(Japanese article on the fusuma project — English version forthcoming.)
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