Vintage B.F. Goodrich vinyl — for my ceiling

Remember that store full of New Old Stock upholstery fabric that I featured last year? Already noodling ahead to my Mahalo Lounge, I bought a few yards of vintage, embossed vinyl that has the look of tooled leather. And indeed, I have used it: I’ve glued it like wallpaper to the ceiling at the far end of the Lounge. It was much much easier than I thought it would be, and I love how it looks!

The vinyl was 54″ wide, and the beamed portion of my ceiling was just under 52″. So, to get it up, I trimmed the edge to size. Then, my plan was to sort of reverse roll it up as one piece. Ack. That was a Sisyphean, in as literal a sense as I’ve ever experienced. It *might* have worked if I’d had scaffolding and two patient friends to help.

So then, what the heck, I thought I’d paste it up in squares cut and applied in the order of the roll so the design would match. And hooray hudee, I found that when I “butted” the edges of each piece, the seams were almost invisible. So, it all looks like one clean piece, and but for the neck craning, it was easy peasy to get up on the ceiling.

In fact, I think that getting this vinyl up on this ceiling section was much easier than it’s gonna be to get the vintage wallpaper up on the rest of the ceiling sections. That’s because paper is so much more delicate and can tear. Also, this vinyl smooths like a dream — no bubbles. I used heavy duty vinyl wallpaper adhesive purchased by the bucket from my local hardware store; I applied it with a thick paintbrush to the back of the fabric then put the fabric right up. No “booking”. Oh, and I did size the ceiling first.

Missy decoupaged magazine ads to her kitchen floor, and it worked great. Why couldn’t I do the same with actual vinyl?

I was also thinking: I wonder if we could use vinyl like this on our floors? Cut the tiles, then put lots of coats on poly on them. Would the poly stick? Would it be strong enough to resist gashing etc? It might be easier to find new or vintage vinyl upholstery and laminate it to become a floor than to find new vinyl sheet flooring in appropriate colors and patterns. A local historic home has leather floor tiles  — why not vinyl, assuming stilettos are banned?

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