This $50 DIY Looks Like Custom Wallpaper — But It Started with a Book

As a garden lover and lifestyle blogger, Cynthia Ruff, always thought of antique botanical bookplates as art. So when she saw the 19th-century botanical gallery of her all-time favorite artist, Marianne North, at Kew Gardens in London, she was inspired to take a little bit of the exhibit home with her. 

No, Ruff’s not an art thief. After the trip, she saw a friend repurpose botanical prints from an old book and filed the idea away as inspiration for a future project. That day came when she found a well-loved copy of the MacMillan Wild Flower Book on ThriftBooks for $30. 

Her guest bathroom, a bland space with white wainscoting, needed something one-of-a-kind to zhush it up. “The hardest part of this project was the prep,” says Ruff, who used a fabric cutter to separate the pages from the binding after taking off the book spine. “Anyone who’s ever installed wallpaper knows you need a straight edge, so I trimmed all the raw edges with a straight edge cutter.” Since the book was published in the 1970s, it had a natural patina on the pages. Ruff loved that detail so she made sure her cuts maintained that. 

She then separated all the pages of flowers into stacks by color family. This helped her pull images randomly as she pasted the pages to her wall, which created a varied color scheme. All that prep work took about two days. 

When it was time to install, pasting the pages to the wall was easier than applying actual wallpaper. The process was done page by page with a hand roller and wallpaper paste. In the end, she only used about one-third of the book’s illustrations. 

It took Ruff half a day to complete the project. When the paste was completely dry, it was sealed with Minwax Polycrylic to protect the paper from bathroom humidity. “I installed it in October 2025, and it looks as good as the day I put it up,” Ruff says. “I’m really impressed, honestly. I figured it would have bubbles or peeled on the corners by now, but it’s fine.” In addition to durability, the subtle sheen makes the pages feel intentional rather than improvised.

Since Ruff used leftover paste and rollers, the book and the Minwax brought this “wallpaper” installation to $50. “I’ve hung a lot of wallpaper over the years, and while this project was undeniably tedious, it was far more rewarding than traditional pasted paper and a fraction of the cost of designer bookplate wallpaper, which can run $300 or more per roll,” she says. 

Once the pages were up, the white walls suddenly felt flat by comparison, so Ruff reached for a leftover can of custom paint and applied it to the wood paneling. For the final bathroom renovation touches, she added a 100-year-old glass-front bookcase to hold guest towels and toiletries. A striped curtain from Pepper Home lends the space a modern air. 

For anyone who maybe thinks using pages as wallpaper is “desecrating” a book, Ruff points out that “too many beautiful volumes quietly disappear to dust and mold on forgotten shelves at estate sales.” The trick is finding something pre-loved and beyond restoration.

In the end, Ruff brought new life to a past-its-prime book — and she barely used a third of it. “The rest is already promised for our mountain house renovation,” she says. “It’s just too special to collect dust!”