Peel and Stick Wallpaper for a Rental Bedroom: A Renter's Guide

Yes, you can put peel and stick wallpaper in a rental bedroom, and take it back down without losing your deposit. Two things decide how cleanly it comes off: your paint needs to have cured about 30 days, and your walls need to be smooth. This is a renter's guide to doing one bold wall the right way, from peel and stick versus pre-pasted to the paint rules, removal, and what the whole room actually costs.

You can't paint. You can't drill. Or maybe you can, but you'd rather not be thinking about those holes eighteen months from now when your landlord walks through the apartment with a clipboard, looking for any reason to keep your deposit. And the bedroom is Beige. Or Millenial Gray. It was when you moved in, and it's starting to feel like it might stay that way forever.

Changing just one wall can make a huge difference to how your whole room feels. That's what we did here: created a rental bedroom built around one wallpapered wall, with inexpensive furniture and lighting that can move with you when the lease ends. Most of it doesn't require making a permanent change to the room. There is one small exception, which we'll get to down below.

The wallpaper: Western Birds & Flowers in Winter Moss

This wallpaper (one of my personal favorites) has hand-illustrated songbirds, wildflowers and trailing foliage in a deep graphite green on a warm cream ground. The repeat is 24 inches, which puts it in the mid-scale range.

That scale works especially well in a small bedroom. A tiny print can start to look like texture when you're standing across the room, while a very large pattern can take over the wall. This one gives you enough detail to notice without making the whole room feel busy. And this scale can even make your small room feel larger and more airy.

👆 Tap the image to order a Winter Moss swatch. Ships free.

The cream ground helps, too. The dark illustrations still have plenty of contrast, but the lighter background keeps the wall from feeling heavy. It also gives you some freedom with everything else in the room. You can keep the bedding and furniture soft and neutral and let the wallpaper carry the bold statement.

The wall in the photo is about twelve feet wide, so you're seeing roughly six repeats across it. That's useful to picture before ordering. A 24-inch pattern sounds fairly large when you're looking at a swatch, but six repeats across a twelve-foot wall gives you a better idea of how it will actually read in a room.

My Western Birds & Flowers pattern is also available in several other colorways if graphite green isn't your thing. See Winter Moss or browse the collection.

Start on your wall, not your screen. A color shifts between your morning light and your lamps at night, so get a real swatch up before you commit to a roll. It ships free, and ordering one comes back to you as a $20 credit toward your rolls. Both of the materials we make are designed to come off cleanly, too. Order a Winter Moss swatch.

Peel and stick or pre-pasted?

If you're renting, this is the decision I'd make before choosing a color. We make both, and two things matter more than anything else: how long you're planning to stay and what kind of paint is already on your walls.

Peel & Stick, $149 a roll. It's self-adhesive, repositionable while you work, and doesn't require water or primer. The manufacturer rates it for short-term use, up to about a year, and says it is fully removable within that year. The adhesive continues to bond after that, so it can still be removed later, but the wall may need some touching up.

There's another detail here that's easy to miss. We recommend that you install peel and stick over eggshell, satin or semi-gloss paint if you can which helps it be removed later. The paint should also have been applied at least thirty days before installation to give it time to fully cure.

Pre-Pasted, $115 a roll. It's $34 less per roll, water-activated, and rated for both short-term and long-term use with no removal window attached to it. It's Class A fire rated and mould and mildew resistant.

The tradeoff is the wall preparation. Our manufacturer recommends two coats of primer, with each coat dried overnight, followed by four weeks of cure time before the wallpaper goes up. That's a much bigger project if you're starting with a typical rental wall.

Both materials need a smooth, flat surface. Neither is a great match for orange peel or knockdown texture without a liner, and Peel & Stick should stay out of rooms with a shower (the same properties that make it easy to remove can also make it peel and come up with heat and steam).

Bottom line: if you're not sure what you're working with, simply order a swatch first. It's much easier to test a 24-inch piece than to discover a problem halfway through a full wall.

Not sure which one you need? Take the three-question quiz. For the full breakdown, including removal steps, read my guide to renter-friendly wallpaper.

Will it come off?

Both materials are removable, but there is an important difference in how they're rated. Peel and stick is rated fully removable within one year. After that, the adhesive has had more time to bond, so it can still be removed, but you may need to patch or touch up the paint afterward. It's a great idea to (carefully) apply a little heat from a heat gun or blowdryer to soften up the adhesive before removing it.

Pre-pasted is rated fully removable without that one-year window. That's one of the reasons it makes more sense when you're planning to stay longer, assuming you're able to meet the primer requirements. And all you need to do is spritz it with water, let it sit for a moment, and peel it back.

There's no need to turn the removal process into a second wallpaper project. The renter-friendly wallpaper guide has the step-by-step removal instructions for both materials.

Start with a swatch

A photograph of wallpaper is a photograph of someone else's light. Yours is different. The same color can look warmer in one room and greener in another, especially once the sun goes down and you're looking at it under lamps.

Get a real piece of the wallpaper onto your wall and look at it in the morning and again at night before you spend money on a full roll. You'll learn more from that than you will from scrolling through another twenty photos online.

Our swatches are generously sized at 24 by 12 inches, printed on the same exact high-quality material as the roll, and they ship completely free. $9 for Pre-Pasted, $12 for Peel & Stick. Order even just one and we'll email you a $20 credit toward your first roll order of $200 or more, so the swatch pays for itself and then some. Order 4 and save 15% automagically at checkout, and you still get that sweet sweet credit.

Order a Winter Moss swatch in Pre-Pasted, $9
Order a Winter Moss swatch in Peel & Stick, $12
See all swatches

Shop the look

The renter rules behind each piece I picked

There's a reason each thing made my list. In a rental, the best-looking solution isn't always the most practical one.

• No hardwiring. The sconces run on rechargeable batteries and the pendant plugs into an outlet. That gives you better lighting without changing the electrical setup in the room.
• Almost no drilling. The curtain rod is tension-mounted and the pendant hangs from a hook. The sconces are the exception: one small screw each. That's two holes in the whole room, both smaller than a pencil and both easy to patch when you move.
• Everything comes with you. Nothing is built into the apartment. The rug, basket, pendant and sconces can all go to the next place, even if the next place looks nothing like this one.

What the whole room actually costs

The furnishings above come to $486.30, at the time of publishing this article, or $526.29 with the second nightstand.

Wallpaper is your biggest statement and investment, so here's the math before you order. Our rolls are 24 inches wide by 12 feet long, so one roll gives you one full-height drop on a standard 8 foot wall plus some extra for walls that aren't usually ever straight and square.

• A feature panel behind the bed, roughly 6.5 feet wide: 4 rolls. $460 in Pre-Pasted, $596 in Peel & Stick.
• A full 12 foot wall, floor to ceiling: 6 rolls. $690 in Pre-Pasted, $894 in Peel & Stick.

The calculator on the product page will work out the quantity for your exact wall and show you the cheaper of the two roll options.

A note on dorm rooms

Everything here can work in a dorm, and Peel & Stick makes sense for a one-year stay, which is the period it's rated for. Check your housing agreement before you install anything, though. Some schools have stricter rules about wall treatments than landlords do, and it's much easier to find that out before move-in day than at the end of the semester.

Common renter questions

Every pattern I create is drawn by my own two hands here at my studio in Idaho and printed to order in the USA. If you're renting, read the paint requirements above before choosing a material. That detail can matter more than the pattern, the price, or how easy the installation looks on the box. 🤍-Stacie