How To Make a Quick & Easy Folding Room Screen

Privacy screens are like folding sculptures, both visually interesting as well as functional. In an outside space, they are a buffer between you and the neighbors, or can block out the bright sun. Inside, they divide spaces, hide clutter, or even serve as a headboard. Making a custom screen is also (surprisingly!) a quick and easy DIY.

• Removable wallpaper (Ours is from Spoonflower)
• Hollow core doors (Ours are from Home Depot)
• A minimum of 4 narrow brass hinges (Ours are from Home Depot)

• Screwdriver or cordless drill with appropriate bit

1. Lay out your wood panels on the floor. This project is pretty large so give yourself plenty of room to work.

2. Center the paper so there is plenty of extra to wrap around each of the sides. Start by peeling off a couple of inches of the backing paper from the wallpaper and wrapping it around the top of the wood panel. The edge of the wood should line up with the top edge of the wallpaper (to ensure it’s not crooked as you move forward).

3. Once it’s secured to the top of the panel, start applying the wallpaper to the front a foot at a time, unrolling and peeling off the backing paper bit by bit. Get rid of any air bubbles as you go by rubbing them towards the edges. If you have large bubbles, or they are in the center of the panels, you might have to back up a bit by lifting the paper and laying it down again. (The repositionable paper makes this extremely easy.)

4. Keep going until you’ve covered the entire front of the panel, and the wallpaper is completely smooth and bubble-free.

5. Wrap the edges of the wallpaper over each of the sides of the wood panels. When you get to the corners, you can either make a hospital corner (much like you would wrap a present). Or you can make a small diagonal slit from the corner of the paper.

Note: To keep costs down, we only papered one side of the panel. If you’re worried about seeing the back of the screen, paint the backs of each panel white, and trim the wallpaper so it ends cleanly at each edge.

6. Once you’ve done all panels, screw on the hinges to the edges of the panels (image above right). Important: alternate the direction of the hinges for each panel (as shown above left) to get an accordion folding effect.

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– Re-edited from a post originally published 4.08.2016 – AL