Accent Wall Adventure

thelipkas
Aug 1, 2014
4 min read

We moved into a house that has two extra bedrooms upstairs. The family before us had two young daughters who lived in these bedrooms which resulted in our inheritance of a purple plaid room and a yellow butterfly room. Just what Ryan always wanted! We told ourselves that it was no big deal and that we probably wouldn't be painting these anytime soon seeing as we don't really spend much time in these two rooms....sorry guests! We made it through the first year, but as the yellow butterfly room because served as our ironing room, by year two we were ready not to be greeted by butterflies everytime we ironed our work clothes.

Butterfly room before (like before we even moved into the house!):

Purple Plaid room before (one before we moved in, the other right before I started painting when I realized I didn't have a before photo- excuse the mess!!!):

This summer, I finally broke down and wanted the purple plaid gone. I'd had enough AND it was summer break from school....I needed a project! I laid my eyes on that purple plaid and I was a goner. Let the DIY commence!!!

We agreed that this would be the room we started our trim painting journey, and that we wanted the main color of the room to be nuetral. While I wanted gray, Ryan felt as though we had enough gray in the house already....we negotiated (isn't marriage great?!) and ended up with a VERY light gray- "Snow Leopard" by Behr. (We started painting in our house with Benjamin Moore, but as I began more and more furniture painting projects we have switched to Behr. On the plus side, Behr has low and zero VOC paint and the odor isn't too bad.) I used the Snow Leopard paint and primer in eggshell for the walls and Ultra White paint and primer in Semi-Gloss for the trim.

The joys of painting trim are still ongoing in the house, so let's not talk about that now! I'll just state: It's sooooooo much FUN to do! *Think* would Ashley say this in a literal way or not?

ANYway, I did two coats on three of the walls and waved goodbye to the plaid. BTW-This new guy was very helpful:

I've used an edger in the past, but when I saw that this one (at Home Depot) had retractable guides that fit between the wheels and your wall, I had to have it. I think it definitely helped to prevent any paint getting on the ceiling.

Once the trim and three of the four walls were finished, it already looked like a new room! It was, however, too stark! I needed some color, stat! I scowered pinterest, of course!, to look for some ideas on accent walls, but to be honest, a lot of them looked like way too much work. (Just being honest here!) Stripes and chevron require measuring AND taping AND painting. No thanks! But then I came across this pin:

and thought- I can totally do this!!! No measuring required! (I swear I really am a math teacher.... you wouldn't think it, except for the amount of geometric shapes involved in this wall!)

I started by painting the wall the same color as the other walls in the room, so that the stripes on the accent wall would match. Then the fun began! Ryan and I started using our frog tape to lay down different shapes all over the wall. The nice thing about this process is that we really couldn't mess anything up! Read: Tape makes straight lines. We tried to mix up the different types of polygons and the different sizes of shapes so that there weren't too many big sections near each other. Here's what the wall looked like after taping:

I when then went over all the tape edges with that same base color again, hoping that whatever paint bled underneath due to our textured walls would end up being the color of the stripe underneath the tape.

I already knew the aqua dresser was going in this room (look at the above before photo- I'll post an entry about it eventually), so we decided to use Behr's "Cool Jazz" again for the accent wall. We also decided on "Rhino" a deeper relative to Snow Leopard, and "Youthful Coral" just to add some excitement! I knew I wanted more gray than blue or coral, so I went through and marked each shape with the color I wanted it to end up being. This made me slow down and really think about my color placement before having at it.

The end result? TRUE LOVE! While there was a little bit of bleeding that I fixed up with a basic foam brush from Michael's, I am so in love with how this wall looks!