A good working surface for pasting wallpaper is essential. Ideally, you should use a pasting board about 25mm narrower than the paper you are hanging. Alternatively, use a sheet of chipboard or a flush-faced door – laid over a pair of trestles or the kitchen table. To help you reach the top of the walls, you will also need at least one pair of steps. Make sure that these are safe.
Arrange the equipment so that you can work on it comfortably and safely, not forgetting that you will often need both hands free to hang the wallpaper. At the same time, gather together all the other tools necessary for the job – plumbline, shears, tape measure, pasting brush, pencil and bucket. The shears are particularly important – try not to economize by using ordinary household scissors which are too small for accurate cuts on this scale.
One final preparatory step is to compare the shades of each separate roll of wallpaper. Where the batch numbers on the outer packing are the same, there should be no prob- lem. But especially if the numbers differ, check the colour of each roll and arrange them so that similar shades run next to each other when you come to paste them up on the wall.