Even before the wallpaper was painted, our basement looked like an entirely new room. It was an incredible transformation to witness. There are a lot more “before” photos in our intro post, but here are some of the paneled walls again, just for reference: And it still looks just as fantastic as when it went in! So, as of the time of writing this, we’re now 17 months past the wallpaper installation. It’s worth noting that we had this work done in September 2015. He took some measurements of the room and told us how many rolls of wallpaper to buy. We decided to proceed with this contractor. ** “Wow,” he said, “this is great stuff.” We could immediately tell that it covered the grooves just fine. He wet the wallpaper in our laundry sink, waited a few moments, and then attached a small strip to the wood paneled bar. If it didn’t look nice, it wouldn’t make a difference since the bar would be gone in a few days anyway. Since, as part of our renovation, we were planning on ripping out our basement bar which also had wood paneling, he offered to put up a piece of wallpaper right there on the bar. He said that he had never worked with paintable wallpaper, but he was willing to give it a try. A third contractor stopped by to provide an estimate.I told the contractor that I thought the wallpaper would cover the paneling grooves well enough, but he said that it wouldn’t work. As I mentioned in the previous post in this series, that would have been a tremendous amount of time and work. He said that he could wallpaper over the paneling, but that we’d still have to fill in the grooves with spackle or drywall mud. The second contractor at least stopped by to provide an estimate.

The first contractor essentially laughed at our suggestion via email, saying that that wallpapering over paneling would not work.Once we decided on paintable wallpaper, I contacted three local wallpaper contractors that I found on Angie’s list. We ended up going the route of paintable wallpaper, and I cannot begin to tell you how pleased we are with the results! (P.S., We bought our paintable wallpaper from Amazon here.) In my Basement Renovation introduction post, I outlined the COUNTLESS (okay, you can count them – five) options we considered regarding our faux wood paneled walls in our basement. Installing Ikea Sektion Kitchen Cabinets as Basement Storage.Basement Renovation – Removing the Old Bar and Installing New Carpet.Using Paintable Wallpaper to Cover Wood Paneling.

Paintable veeer panel