would wallpapering bottom half of wall and painting top half look really rubbish?

[truthisinthewine]

Our living room is in desperate need of redecoration. It is currently entirely magnoila with a glossed white dado rail round the centre of the room. It has been like this since we moved in and I hate it.

Although I am not keen on the dado rail I am not keen to remove it as not sure how much damage it will do to the wall taking it off.

I have zero decorating imagination so asked my friend today and she suggested papering bottom half of the room under dado rail and painting top half.

Has anyone done this, any opinions on how it might look. I hadn't though of combining the two.

If not anyone any other ideas of what I can do. It's a north facing room about 3.5m x 4.5m so needs to be something nice and warm feeling.

We have paper & paint , it looks great and very easy to do.

We did this in old house. Looked fine. NE facing room. Barley white above dado, pinky red William Morris-ish patterned wallpaper below, beige carpet, cream curtains. I think you need to keep the top half fairly neutral.

We did this in the lounge of our previous house and IMO it looks very nice. Like yours, the room was north facing and needed warming up, so we had a bronze patterned wallpaper below the dado, the dado in white and a rich ivory colour paint above (on lining paper, not plaster). There was also a cornice, which we had done in a gold-leaf effect. The carpet was dark red. The curtains were a mix of gold/bronze and red.

In one of the bedrooms we did take the risk and take a dado off ... and the amount of plaster that came with it was awful! (perhaps made worse by the fact that the house stemmed from the 1880s). I don't think I would do it again with such an old house as we ended up having to do a major replastering job to get the walls smooth again.

Happy New Year!

I would remove the dado... sorry, I hate the things.

We had a dado in our front room when we bought the house. Correction - it was one dado on top of another.

worth it though.. the room looks so much bigger and less stuck in the 80s

The only problem with paper is that it gets damaged easily.
Have you thought about tongue and groove panelling?
you can buy bead and butt mdf that looks great when painted

I think it would look very old-fashioned - it was the rage about ten years ago. Choose a pale but warm paint and then warm up the rest of the room with soft furnishings and throws, some nicely-framed pictures etc.

If you really don't want to remove the dado then I would buy Dulux specially mixed colours in neutral shades and use the same tint but a couple of shades darker underneath the dado. Then I would use an eggshell finish in cream not white on the dado so it doesn't stand out so much.