I think that parents often forgo wallpaper in because pasting up wallpaper seems much more difficult than simply painting a wall. The process actually isn't difficult - cleaning the walls is perhaps the hardest part - and it doesn't create the fumes and mess of paint. Wallpaper also seemed to have been neglected by serious designers for years, but no more. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of boutique design firms producing fantastic paper. You can even make your own wallpaper paste to make sure you know just what's going onto your walls, and save on your budget, too. (More on that later.)

Friday marked the opening of an exhibition of children’s wallpaper and books at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. The museum holds the largest collection of wallcoverings in the country, and this exhibition pulls out some of the most whimsical. Check out a few on their website for inspiration.

Here are some of great papers, all available online, and all reasonably priced.


Graham-Brown’s "Frames" paper is popular for children’s rooms, and inspires filling in the frames with original on-the-wall doodling. This site also carries a variety of other papers, and child-friendly wall-decals.


Rose and Radish carries Cole and Son’s “Woods” paper, first issued in 1950, which would be lovely for a child’s room.


Flavor Paper carries all sorts of fantastic patterns, hand-printed in New Orleans’s ninth ward, including this pop scratch-and-sniff (yes, it smells!) banana paper. The site also offers other less Warholesque options.


There are some great reproduction cowboy, atomic-age, and animal prints at Design Your Wall.

There are also a few sites that sell wonderful rolls of vintage paper, perhaps your greenest choice. Vintage paper falls into the same price range as new paper. Try Second Hand Rose, Rosie’s Vintage Wallpaper, and Hannah’s Vintage Wallpaper.

Cooper-Hewitt’s website also reminded me that you don’t have to paper a whole wall to reap the benefits of paper. Their site shows one paper whose images are meant to be cut out and pasted into scenes, or designs, of your choice, like an wall appliqué.

You could make wall appliqués out of anything - pictures from an old book, magazines, fabric, or cut from wallpaper. Simply glue them up with some wallpaper paste.


Or, if you’re clumsy with scissors, you can buy them from Brooklyn-based Romp. You’ve probably seen a picture of their giraffe wallpaper decal. I think there is a law that every story about a child’s room in any interior design magazine has to show their giraffe.

Finally, here’s an easy, effective, and non-toxic wallpaper paste recipe. There are a lot of recipes on line, but this one caught my eye because it includes an ingredient intended to act as a preservative, which many others don't mention. It's from care2.com.

Ingredients

• 1 cup flour (wheat, corn, or rice)


• 3 teaspoons alum


• water


• 10 drops oil of cloves (natural preservative)

Directions
Combine the flour and alum in a double boiler. (If you don’t have a double boiler, set a smaller pan inside a bigger one that contains enough water that can be brought to a boil without overflowing.) Add enough water to make a consistency of heavy cream; stir until blended. Heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture has thickened to a gravy texture. Let cool. Stir in the clove oil. Pour into a glass jar with a screw top. Apply with a glue brush.

Makes 1 cup. Shelf life: Two weeks, refrigerated.

Have you had any success stories or challenges with wallpaper?

The screened-in porch may be the most family-friendly room in a house. It’s certainly the least expensive, and perhaps the greenest addition. Screening in an existing porch usually costs less than $200 and, while somewhat complicated, can be completed in a weekend if you have reasonable carpentry skills. Building a porch from scratch will certainly set you back less than adding a "family" room, and you'll pay no heating or cooling bills, nor worry about off-gassing building materials. We find the porch more essential than another bathroom, and if pressed, I would sacrifice my washer and dryer before giving up my screened porch.

Once a standard feature in American homes, this room lost favor with the advent of air-conditioning, but it makes perfect sense for today’s families. It’s a like a playroom for the entire family that you can clean with a hose. Even if mosquitoes aren’t a problem in your area, screens provide a magical intimacy. The space becomes more of a room, and this opens up its usefulness. People linger at the table. Nerves are calmed. Sleeping outside begins to feels like the right thing to do. And consider these family friendly benefits:

• Messy meals are no problem. Sweep up the food, hose it off, or leave it. In the morning, the baby-flung rice is magically transformed into silver snail trails. (Not recommended if your scavengers are mice.)


• A simple meal on a porch feels like a picnic. Bird songs, breezes, and afternoon sunlight can’t find you in the dining room.


• Our child spends hours spotting squirrels and pointing out birds.


• For parents, the porch provides an escape from the noise of the washing machine, the telephone, and the to do pile.


• Messy art projects are no problem. I recently provided 6 toddlers with brushes and paint, and watched them paint the paper, themselves, and my porch with nary a moment’s worry.


• Being outside takes the edge off a crying baby, a harried mother, and the visiting mother-in-law.


• A rainstorm becomes a theatrical experience.


• It’s your turn to sit in a swing.


• After the kids go to bed, when you open a bottle of wine and sit on the porch, you’ll feel like your vacation self, something every parent should feel as often as possible.

The smell of fall in the air always makes me sad to leave the garden, but I’m brokenhearted to leave the screened porch. A porch with a even a small footprint can make your house feel much larger, with no new mortgage required.

Painting a room is the simplest way to make it feel fresh and pulled together. But until recently, updating your home required introducing toxins into your environment. VOCs, or Volatile Organic Compounds, are the primary problem in paint. They produce ozone, which makes you dizzy, and can trigger asthma attacks, irritate your eyes, and has been linked to kidney disease and some cancers. Conventional paints also include a host of other known toxins - over 300 of them, on average.

Happily, paint manufactures have introduced dozens of readily available alternatives. They cost a bit more, running around $35. Using one of these new paints, however, makes a DIY job a true pleasure: You won’t feel sick while you’re working, and you won’t be polluting your home.

Differences between alternative paints are difficult to decipher, and no mandatory standard for labeling paint exists. Green Seal, an independent non-profit that sets standards for environmentally responsible products, offers a certification to manufactures based on a host of important concerns, including VOC content, the absence of chemicals, durability, and performance. To guarantee that a product is actually an improvement over conventional paint, look for the Green Seal label, and be prepared to pay more for increasingly pure products.

Here are the three families of alternative paint:

Low VOC Paint. This is the most fluid category, and some paints are labeled "Low-VOC" or "No Odor" but still contain relatively dangerous VOC levels. Green Seal’s standards are much stricter than the EPA's, so beware of "EPA-certified" paints without the Green Seal emblem. The EPA standard for a low-VOC paint is 250 g/L for latex, but Green Seal requires 50 g/L. "Low-VOC" paints are readily available at all the big-box home stores and national paint stores.

Zero VOC Paint. "Zero-VOC" really means "very-low-VOC," usually under 5 g/L. This is the least toxic type of paint produced by national paint manufacturers. Again, the best Zero-VOC will be Green Seal certified. (Harmony Paint by Sherwin Williams, Mythic Paint, and Yolo Colorhouse meet this specification.)

Natural Paint. These paints are produced by small companies, and unless you live in a large city you’ll have to order them online. They are made from natural ingredients, like water, plant dyes, and beeswax. If you have chemical sensitivities, however, you should still read the label carefully. Those allergic to oranges, for example, probably won’t want to paint a house with an orange-oil based product. Texture and performance vary between brands, and you will want to read consumer reviews to decide which one best fits your project. Overall, though, the natural paint companies are producing high-quality products that produce lovely results. (Brands include Bio Shield and Old Fashioned Milk Paint.)

These categories only consider the base of the paint, but pigments (the color that gets added in at the store) usually add between 3 to 5 g/L of VOC’s, and some colors, like yellows and some reds, are often made from heavy metals. Again, you’ll need to use your own judgment as your determine your comfort level for chemical exposure.

All options, however, are better than the paints of ten years ago, and you’ll notice an immediate difference in odor that hints at the potential long-lasting positive impact on your family’s health.