Paint Vs Wallpaper

If you have recently moved into a new house, or are wanting to freshen up your home, you may be finding yourself debating paint vs wallpaper. Victory Colours have created a guide to help you choose which is best for you.

Which takes longer to do?

It is often difficult to know which is going to take longer to do, especially when looking at the quality of either paint or wallpaper. Most people think that the wallpaper application takes longer, however the painting process can take equally as long if thorough preparation is required, and where multiple coats of paint may be needed.

If time is not an issue for your DIY project, you will find that paint vs wallpaper will usually take a similar amount of time anyway so it just depends on what will look best in the space you are decorating.

Which process needs more preparation?

If you do not prepare your walls before either painting or papering, you will not get the best results and you may end up wanting to redo what you've just done. Smoothing out your walls is one of the most important steps before painting; you will want to make sure that any holes are filled and sanded so that you have a seamless finish.

When preparing your walls for wallpaper, you will want to check the colour of the wallpaper in comparison to the wall colour which will be underneath. For example, if you were wanting to put a light wallpaper over a dark painted wall, you may want to paint the wall lighter first.

Overall, if you are fortunate enough to have smooth walls already, there will be similar preparation for paint vs wallpaper. However, if there are slight imperfections, such as small holes from nails or leftover residue from blue tac, wallpaper can be more forgiving and does not require as much work.  Also, the pattern and texture of wallpaper can draw the eye away from surface imperfections.

Which is less damaging to the environment?

Here at Victory Colours, sustainability is important to us. If you are eco conscious like us, you may be considering which will less negatively impact the environment. Buying unnecessary rolls of wallpaper or paint is not only costly but can negatively impact the environment by eventually ending up in landfill. At Victory Colours, we source Olenka Design which are produced to order, this method means there is less waste and it is more ecological for the environment. 

Choose your wallpapers wisely, many papers such as the Anaglypta Original and Supaglypta designs use pure paper and are PVC free.  With printed wallpaper designs, take care to choose ones with a lower carbon footprint, and ones that use water based inks.

Regarding paint, we have carefully curated a collection of Victory Colours Eco Conscious paint colours, which have excellent coverage (so you need to use less – a saving both in terms of time and money) and are virtually VOC free, meaning they have very little odour and no lingering nasty paint smell.  Victory Colours have a wide range of eco friendly decorating materials in a variety of colours and designs. If you can't decide on one colour, you can order a variety of our paint samples here. 

Shop our Wallpaper Collection here or visit our Eco friendly paint collection here.