Older walls need a lining first
Lime and sand plaster in older houses can be soft, patched and uneven. Hanging a finish paper straight onto it shows every bump and can pull at the joins. We fill, make good and hang lining paper first, cross-lined where needed, so the finish paper dries onto a consistent surface.
Soham has 49 listed buildings, including the Manor House at Grade II*. If you live in a listed home, check with East Cambridgeshire District Council before removing historic finishes, and we'll protect anything you're keeping, as we did with an existing William Morris paper in Cambridge.
Designer papers and feature walls in Soham
In the town's newer homes, walls are usually flatter, and a single feature wall behind a bed or on a chimney breast is a common request. With heritage designs, Simon, our wallpaper specialist, checks batch numbers and plans where each repeat will fall before cutting. Our wallpaper hanging page shows more of his work.
With around 60% of Soham households owning their home, many papering jobs here are long-term choices, so we hold samples up in the room to judge the scale of the pattern first.
Soham at a glance
- 15 milesby road from our Landbeach base, about 23 minutesOSRM routing
- 15%of properties were built before 1919VOA Council Tax stock
- 6%date from 1919 to 1939VOA Council Tax stock
- 5,236householdsCensus 2021
- 49listed buildingsHistoric England
- 60%of homes are owner-occupiedCensus 2021
How we approach wallpapering
On a pre-1919 wall we'd strip carefully, wash off old paste and test how sound the plaster is. Loose areas go to our plasterers to skim, then lining paper goes up. We size where the manufacturer says to, plan the repeat from the main focal point and hang each length to a plumb line. The full method, products and FAQs are on our wallpapering page.