ONE ROOM CHALLENGE - NURSERY [WEEK TWO]

Accent Wall - Good From Far but Far From Good

Have you ever started a DIY project and instantly felt regretful of attempting to do it yourself? I am embarrassed to admit it, but that feeling happens to me a lot. Mostly because I am a perfectionist and my attempt at certain things just does not compare to the professionals, especially when it comes to painting! I made two samples on the foam core board to test out the colors. The darker color is the Kelly Moore Winter Solstice and the lighter is the Kelly Moore Big Daddy Blue.

This week we finished the part of the Nursery that we predicted would be the hardest and most time consuming - the accent stencil wall. The wall we chose to do as the "Accent Wall" is the first wall you see when you come into the room and the wall in which we will be putting the crib on. The wall is about 12 feet long and 10 feet high. Like many homes in central Texas, our walls are textured with a monterey drag drywall finish. I knew from a past wall stencil project that the textured walls made stenciling very difficult since the walls are bumpy, using a roller with the stencil is completely out of the question because of the paint bleed through. When I did a stencil wall in the past, I used a small 1/2" stencil brush and dabbed the color on. That method took forever, so we decided to have our nursery wall skim coated with a joint compound to smooth out the texture beforehand. This is also what I do to walls before adding wallpaper! Here is what the wall looked like after it was skim coated.

Once the skim coat was dry, we added green Frog Tape to all the edges to protect the sidewalls, ceiling, and baseboards. The way the Frog Tape is designed to help with clean edge lines required us to lock in the edges with the wall/ceiling color before we added the base color. We painted the base color using Kelly Moore - Winter Solstice. The skim coat flat wall finish made painting the base coat a breeze!

Next, after feeling confident with how smoothly the base color went on, we were ready for the stencil! The stencil we chose is called the Beads Allover By Cutting Edge Stencil. I started with the ceiling edge detail that was provided with the stencil. The ceiling edge stencil is much smaller and made to allow you to take the pattern all the way up to the ceiling like a wallpaper. To get the stencil to stick to the wall, I first tried using removable spray adhesive on the back of the stencil. This stayed on the wall perfectly without any gaps. I used the small stenciling brush for the area by the ceiling and edges to ensure I didn't accidentally get excess paint on the side walls or ceiling. After my first attempt at the stencil - I was pretty discouraged. Once I took the stencil off the wall, the base color had peeled off a bit, and residue from the adhesive was evident.

I was ready to call the accent wall off and switch gears when Matt jumped in to save the day! We tried a few more sections with different methods until we came up with a system! What ended up working best for us on this wall was to use blue painters tape to adhere the stencil to the base wall color. We then used a foam roller with barely any paint on it to roll the stencil pattern from top to bottom after we did the initial top edge row across the top. We left the edges of the wall to the very end where I ended up cutting the stencil to the correct size to fill the gap between where the stencil left off to the end of the sidewall. Matt truly was the MVP (most valuable painter!). Once we had the process down, it started to go faster! All in, it took us about 6 hours of just the stenciling. We are very pleased with the end results. However, there are a lot of imperfections so we say the wall is good from far but far from good!

To see the other amazing room transformation and cheer on all the designers participating in the Fall 2020 One Room Challenge, visit: https://www.oneroomchallenge.com/orc-blog