What to choose, wallpaper or wall painting?

When carrying out repair work in an apartment or a private house, the problem of choosing the optimal wall covering often arises. Its most common types are wallpaper or painting.

Both finishing methods have their advantages and disadvantages. This does not allow you to unequivocally determine which one is better for each specific case. For many years, disputes have continued, both among professionals and among beginners. However, the situation is not as hopeless as it might seem at first glance.

If you clearly understand the advantages and disadvantages of wallpaper and painting, as well as compare the costs required for repairs using these materials for a particular room, then choosing one or another method is not so difficult.

Advantages of painting walls

Wall painting when carrying out repairs is often used in Western Europe and North America. In our country, this method of finishing is used mainly in offices and government agencies. At the same time, recently painting walls has become increasingly popular in the design of apartments and private houses.

Its benefits include:

1. The high practicality of such a coating. Painted walls are not afraid of any stains, including those from coffee, tea or other difficult-to-remove substances. Such a coating can and should be washed, since this only has a positive effect on its appearance.
2. Pets have no desire to sharpen their claws on a wall that is covered with paint. Even if the pet wants to, he is unlikely to be able to seriously hurt her.
3. A large selection of colors and shades of paints, which are presented in modern hardware stores, create a wide scope for design ideas. In addition, when painting walls, it is possible to arbitrarily combine colors, as well as apply ornaments or relief patterns using special stencils. All this is quite difficult to do when using wallpaper.
4. Ease of painting work. Here it should be noted that we are talking only directly about painting the wall. The process of its preparation and alignment is very time-consuming, in many cases only specialists can do such work. In addition, when working with large areas, you need to carefully monitor the uniformity of the application of layers of paint, the absence of streaks, etc.
5. The ability to use painted walls without wallpaper in rooms with high humidity, such as a bathroom or shared bathroom.

Disadvantages of painting walls

Painting walls in rooms, along with obvious advantages, still has some disadvantages:

1. Complexity surface preparation for painting. It takes the right skills to do this job. If the condition of the walls is far from ideal, you need to prepare for significant financial costs for building materials.
2. The high cost of designer paints, as well as stencils, texture rollers and other tools and materials that are necessary to give the interior personality and beauty. Walls painted in one color without wallpaper often look too boring, so this painting is not always the best solution for living spaces.
3. The ability of the paint to chip off under strong impacts, for example, during the rearrangement of furniture. In order to repair such a flaw with high quality, it is often necessary to use putty.

Benefits of using wallpaper

Wallpapering rooms been used for quite a long time. In our country, it is this method of interior decoration of rooms that has become most widespread.The main advantages of using wallpaper include:

1. The ability to hide small wall defects, such as chips, cracks or small irregularities in the plaster. This allows you not to perform complex and expensive work on the perfect alignment of the walls, which only masters of the construction business can do.
2. When using high-quality wallpaper glue, you can not worry about the reliability of wallpaper fastening.
3. Attractive appearance. Modern wallpaper manufacturers pay great attention to giving their products the most aesthetic appearance. The wallpapers are pleasant to the touch, and a huge variety of their types allows you to choose the ideal model, taking into account the purpose of the room, the personal preferences of the tenant and, of course, the overall design of the apartment or house.
4. Extreme ease of wallpapering. Even a completely unprepared person can cope with such work, it is enough to make a little effort and carefully monitor the correct joining of adjacent lanes.
5. Environmental Safety. Modern wallpapers do not contain any chemicals that cause allergies or other diseases, even in people predisposed to them.
6. Additional sound and thermal insulation. Unlike painted walls, a room pasted over with wallpaper retains heat better and echoes less, even in the absence of furniture. This, of course, contributes to the creation of additional comfort.
7. Paper or non-woven wallpaper allows air to pass through well, this allows the walls to "breathe" and prevents the accumulation of moisture on them, as well as the formation of fungus.

Wallpaper Disadvantages

Despite these advantages, such a coating has disadvantages, the main of which include:

1. Difficulty, and sometimes the impossibility of removing stains from various substances from the wall surface, as well as traces of a marker or pencil. Even when using washable wallpaper, there is no guarantee that the dirt will be effectively removed.
2. The soft paper surface attracts pets, which can chew on the wallpaper or sharpen their claws on it. This leads to hopeless damage to the appearance of the wall.
3. The impossibility of using even the highest quality wallpaper in rooms with high humidity.
4. fragility. Such a coating begins to lose its original appearance within a few years after the repair.
5. Wallpaper is very easy to scratch with a sharp object, and masking such a scratch, on the contrary, is extremely difficult.

What to choose?

In order to finally decide which of the considered types of interior decoration to give preference, you should carefully analyze all the aspects that characterize a particular situation. The most important of them are:

1. The condition of the walls in the rooms where it is planned to make repairs.
2. The planned amount of funds that can be spent on wallpapering or painting the walls in the room.
3. The skill level of the people who will carry out the repair work.
4. The period for which it is supposed to make repairs to the premises.

All of these issues are inextricably linked, for example, it depends on the condition of the walls whether it is worth hiring professionals for repairs or you can do it on your own, and this, in turn, affects the cost of repairs.

Thus, in order to determine which wall covering is better and cheaper, you must first assess the initial situation, analyze the positive and negative qualities of each coating, the personal preferences of the residents, as well as the financial costs of repairs. Only after that it will be possible to unambiguously say which option for interior wall decoration is preferable to use.