If you follow me on Instagram, you might have caught my instastories on the accent wall in our hallway I’ve been working on. At our Jersey shore house, we have a narrow hallway leading to the bedrooms. It’s too narrow for a gallery of pictures on the side walls — you could never get far enough away to look at them! So, I thought I would make the end wall a focal point by painting it differently from the rest.
Here’s what it looked like before:
I toyed with the idea of a solid color, a stencil and even a buffalo check. In the end, I went with a really inexpensive and easy choice — a freehand basketweave design using paint leftover from our exterior shutters. I actually found the idea while trolling Pinterest:
Source: mayricherfullerbe.com
So here’s the super easy steps:
1. Sketch out your pattern on paper first so you get a sense of the scale of the design relative to the size of the wall.
2. Tape off the adjacent walls with painter’s tape.
3. I free-handed diagonal lines on the wall with pencil to keep me going fairly straight. You could use a straight edge and be more precise but I didn’t bother.
4. Using a narrow, tapered edge brush (mine was about 3/4 inch) , start in the corner and just kept working across and down the wall. The paint I used was SW Dignity Blue, exterior satin. Obviously there’s no reason to use exterior paint — it’s what I happened to have on hand.
I actually found the process to be fun and very relaxing!
5. Go back and erase or paint over your pencil lines and touch up any mistakes. I still need to do that but that’s for a day when there’s no other fun diy projects going on!
Next blog post: My 5 picks for transforming a hallway!
