*Today’s post was made possible by Fancy Walls, and features gifted product for the purposes of a candid review. All opinions are my own.

If you remember our last 1960s home, you might recall that it had tons of amazing architecture, with its angular facade and sloped ceiling. We don’t have anything like that here in our new-to-us retro ranch, but one thing that we do have that our old house didn’t is trim work. Nearly every room in this house is accented with crown molding and chair rail, which gives each space a feeling of elegance and classic style that you just don’t get with plain walls.

The only exception, for whatever reason, is our front formal living room. This space doesn’t have any crown molding to speak of and no chair rail either, so it has always felt like the odd man out in comparison to the other rooms surrounding it. The living room does have a classic fireplace mantel with pretty trim detailing, so that helps, but lately I’ve wanted to add more to the space.

Not wanting to commit to a full crown molding installation job, I decided to try something a little simpler: a trimmed-out door surround. I’ve seen this look in other more historic homes, and thought it could be the perfect way to give the space a little more dimension and sophistication without a ton of work and mathematics involved.

My plan was to install inexpensive trim around the one doorway in the room that mimicked the look of what we have on our existing fireplace mantel, and then lay peel-and-stick wallpaper inside the trim work to provide added texture and color. I ultimately chose one of my own designs from a collaboration I did earlier this year with Fancy Walls. It’s our Fog Retro Talbott Faux Grasscloth Wallpaper, and looks so much like real grasscloth that John actually reached out to feel the assumed texture when he saw the finished project!

When I first came up with the concept for this project, I was anxious about how hard it was going to be to wallpaper the intricately shaped gap between the old door trim and new decorative surround. Making those tiny cuts was going to be so tedious and labor-intensive. A few days later, though, the lightbulb went off in my head. I just needed to swap the steps! If I wallpapered first, covering a larger area than I actually needed, I could then install the trim over top, and then cut the wallpaper to the trim edge in seconds. So, I did exactly that: sticking my haphazardly cut wallpaper to the wall around the door first in preparation for trim.

Before actually installing it, I painted my pieces of trim using a color that I thought matched the wallpaper nicely. After giving that 24 hours to dry, I used my miter saw to cut the trim down to size. I used a power tool since mine has a built-in ruler and makes for cleaner cuts overall, but I find that wood trim like this is really easy to cut manually with a hand saw or even miter snips, like these. Next, I attached the cut trim pieces all the way around the door using my nail gun, and then I used a fresh razor blade to cut off all of the rough-edge wallpaper around the outside edges of the trim. Finally, I filled all of the nail holes with paintable silicone, and touched up the color wherever it was needed.

Doing the wallpaper first saved so much time and tedium, and I love that I was able to do so sort of messily, too, since the outside edges were all going to be trimmed off to fit the new molding anyway. Stepping back, the room now has so much more character and texture. The new door trim makes the ceiling look higher, and also gives this space more of the formal feeling it deserves. I might just repeat this project on the doors in our hallway next!

Click here to see all of the patterns in my wallpaper collection with Fancy Walls, and let me know in the comments which neutral design is your favorite.