Hand Painted Accent Wall

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!