Wall finish | Mobile Home Walls and Wallcoverings | User Forum

Post edited 10:38 pm – July 23, 2010 by mymobilehome

Hi Skrapwood!  Thanks so much for helping us to build our forum.  

We have tried several different things and have had some successes and some failures.  We spent a lot of money on a beautiful fabric wallpaper for our bedroom. We put a wide strip of wall repair plain wallpaper over the spots between the wallboard pieces. I think the strips we used were too wide as they are visible under the nice wallpaper.  

In a bathroom we redid, we used only the wall repair wallpaper and painted it when we were done.  This worked fairly well, but in some spots you can still tell there is an empty strip below the paper.  

A few things we have done to our walls that we are happy with are as follows:

In our living room, we used a spongy, thick wallpaper that looks like marble.  We purchased it at Lowes. It was pretty inexpensive, like less than 15$ per roll.  We put white wainscot on the bottom of many of our walls just to provide extra insulation on exterior walls, as well as to get rid of the empty strip sections you're talking about at least on the bottom of the walls.  Plus, it looks more like a house with wainscot.  Home Depot has a really simple, inexpensive wainscot product that comes with a top and bottom rail, then you get packages of 8" wainscot sections that slide into one another.  It's so easy we've done a whole bathroom after work in an evening. 

The spongy wallpaper can also be purchased with a few different textures and colorless so you can paint it.  Just look for wallpaper that suggests that it is for wall repair or covers bad walls.  Lowe's has several to choose from.  The wallpaper we special ordered for the bathroom I mentioned above wasn't as thick as I would have liked it.  It's hard to judge when you are looking at it online.   

I know you said you didn't want to replace the drywall, but we have replaced several walls (and even one ceiling in our bathroom) with beadboard.  It looks fantastic, doesn't need to be painted, and when you use trim pieces to cover the seams, you get a "cottage" look that just looks great.  

We have tried spackling it.  HUGE mistake.  One of the biggest, most depressing blunders we have ever had while remodeling our mobile home.  I do not recommend it at all.  

I hope some of these ideas spark new ideas for you.  Please feel free to reply and ask about any of them.  I'm happy to elaborate.  And, as always, if you find a great solution to this really annoying problem for all mobile home owners (right up there with popcorn ceilings!), please come back and share your solution with us all here.

Good luck!

Beth and Darren