While painting a room can be a great deal of fun, this time-consuming process involves large messes and lingering odors. For a high-impact, low-maintenance home improvement project, consider upgrading home decor with wall fabrics.

Step 1: Choose the Right Fabric for Decorating Walls

Create a sketch of your design vision, including primary, secondary, and/or accent colors, prints, and textures. You might cover one or two accent walls, or all four walls in a room, depending upon your design theme.

From retro to eco-friendly, faux leather to microsuede, plaids to denims, jacquards to animal prints, adding fabric to your walls opens up an array of interior decorating options. You can browse dozens of home decor fabrics at Fabrics.com.

Step 2: Measure The Walls You Will Cover and Cut the Fabric to Specifications

Cut the fabric yourself, or have it cut by the online or fabric retail store of your choice. Cut the fabric just a little longer than you need it, and trim with scissors at project's end.

Step 3: Gather These Home Improvement Tools

• A staple gun (preferably electric) and long staples
• Hot glue gun and glue sticks
• Trim for fabric
• Gloves
• Ladder
• Scissors

Stapling works best with drywall. For plaster walls, this process will be more complicated, as you will need to use a starch mixture, or attach lath strips and staple fabric to the wood.The process of stapling and gluing fabric to walls lends itself better to heavier, more durable fabrics. Thinner fabrics, such as muslin or silk should be applied with starch.

Step 4: Apply Fabric to Walls

1. Wash the walls with warm soap and water. Allow to dry.
2. Start by stapling fabric near the ceiling or highest point where you want to hang it.
3. Throughout this home improvement project, keep staples in a straight line about two inches apart.
4. After finishing the top, stretch fabric tightly, and staple at baseboards in center, considering where trim will go.
5. Again, stretch fabric tightly, and staple around bottoms, corners, doors and windows.
6. Using hot glue, add bias tape or trim over visible staples at perimeters and edges.

One final upside to covering walls with fabric is the low-maintenance clean-up time of about 15 minutes.

In the space of one afternoon, you can sit back and enjoy the fruits of another successful do-it-yourself home renovation. Now that's high impact home improvement!