I am going to have a bit of a rant, so you are forewarned. I shall endeavour to explain the reason for my rant.

For the past two days, I have been decorating my youngest sons’ bedroom. Now it’s not a large room by any standard, but he seems to like it. R*** is Autistic and with that in mind we had decided to redecorate the room using the same wallpaper as before. We just wanted to refresh the décor, but not to change it as change can upset him. I had measured up and estimated (and this is where the title of my post begins to show its face) that “depending on the pattern” I would need three rolls of wallpaper. As is usual, we bought four rolls with the intention of returning one roll un-used.

Our house is fairly modern. It’s around twenty years old and one of ten built by the same builder. You would expect that the height of the rooms would be of some form of national standard and I understand from the brochure, that we received with the house that this is the case. So to my simple mind, it should be blatantly obvious to wallpaper manufacturers that this ‘standard height’ exists. However it would seem that this is not the way wallpaper designers/manufacturers think, as my rant below will show.

To the job in hand. I measured and cut the first length of wallpaper, leaving a two centimetre trim at both ends. The said length was pasted and hung to the wall without any issues. This is where the problem began. I again measured and prepared to cut the second length only to discover, that because of pattern repeat I would lose over 1 .2 metre of paper before the pattern matched. A quick calculation on the smartphone app, showed that I could only get three full lengths of paper, with a length that was twenty centimetres short. More smartphone calculations showed that I was not going to get away with only three rolls. At £12.00 per roll, it is not a cheap option to use four rolls. I guessed that had the pattern been, say ten centimetre shorter, three rolls would have been enough. Or if the roll had been another thirty centimetres longer, three rolls would have been enough.

I am now angry about this! Surely I shouted, to nobody in particular, it would be a simple enough task to ensure that wallpaper sizes complement standard wall sizes. But of course, if that were to happen, then I would have only spent £36.00 rather than the £48.00 that the wallpaper designer/manufacturer wanted me to spend. So it is my belief, that these people design wallpaper, so that we mere mortals have to purchase more than we really need. Thus increasing their profit and thereby causing me grief!

Rant over!

(I suppose I could always use plain wallpaper and add my own designs……hmmm food for thought there!)