A Weekend of Pinspiration - Part 3 - Painted Wallpaper

After a very long delay, here is the follow-up to Part I and Part II of my Pinterest weekend with Lisa.  I'll explain the reason for the delay, so just keep reading!

For our largest project of the weekend, Lisa and I decided we wanted to tackle this:

Stenciled Wallpaper



Phase I of our dining room makeover occured when Tim's mom came to visit.  We repainted the dining room a slightly lighter blue and I had a secret plan that I wanted to do the wallpaper stencil.  After a little bit of searching on Pinterest, I knew I'd found the one I wanted.  But, when we printed out the stencil from the website, which I linked below, it was TINY and we thought that much pattern would be too busy all over the walls.  So, we headed to Office Max and had them blow up the stencil (honestly it took a few guesses and we had them print a couple).  The total cost for this was a little more than I was expecting (about $10), but still not too bad! 

See link to template here

We traced the template onto some sturdy cardboard so it would hold up while we traced it - honestly the hardest part of this entire project was probably cutting through the cardboard.

We also wanted to make sure that the design was spaced semi-evenly on the wall.  We figured out that the space we were covering was 73" tall and each design was 20.5" tall.  Because we wanted an even amount of overhang on each side of the design, I figured out how many full designs would fit and divided the remining amount by 2 - the magic number was 5.75" of overlap on each end.  We ended up folding our paper template so that there was 5.75" and used this for the partial designs. 

I may be an accountant, but I think I'm crippled by always using a calculator - ignore the erase marks, the "borrowing" from the other digits and my carrying of the 1  :)

I decided to follow the advice of the woman whose pin I copied above and instead of using white paint, we used the leftover blue wall color paint I had and mixed in some white (it came out a more light grey/blue).  I like this better because there isn't too stark of a contrast.

Once we had our paint ready, it was just tracing and painting.  Luckily, my dining room has wainscoating and is open to the living room so we only had to do the top half of 3 walls (really only 2 since one of them has a large window).  I tackled the tracing while Lisa did the painting.  The wall is by no means perfect and we didn't use a level or really measure it out - just eyeballed it.  It helped that we tried to make the space we painted the width of the paintbrush so Lisa only had to do one stroke and it kept the painting uniform.

Design traced in pencil

 We just contined all the way around the room:

It really didn't take a lot of time when the two of us were working on it - maybe 6 hours total.  So, now the reason for the delay...

We had originally traced the outline of the stencil in pencil.  We did a test once the paint had dried to make sure the pencil came off, and it worked great!  Well.....turns out, if you let the pencil sit for a few hours or if you paint on TOP of the pencil, you can still see it underneath the lighter color and it WILL NOT ERASE!  Also, when I tried erasing over the darker color, the pencil would smear and leave dark streaks.  So, word to the wise - use a VERY light touch when tracing and try to keep your lighter paint color inside the paint lines. I ended up having to do a second coat of the entire lighter color and then touch up a good amount of the darker color (don't forget to save a little bit before you pour the white in - you'll need it!)  It took me much longer to do this by myself, hence the reason for no update post. 

But, I'm happy to report - I'm all finished!!  All in all, I'm pleased as punch with how it came out!  Yes, I said "pleased as punch" - I also knit and love to go to the library - I'm 90 years old, don't judge.  Especially, since the only cost was about $20 for the template and a quart of white paint!  I think it was totally worth it, but don't take my word for it - a picture (or three) is worth a thousand words:

I also got some new curtains and a new rod - the previous one was just too skinny and not substantial enough.  I was proud of myself for being able to mix patterns - normally I'm a scaredy cat about about that kind of thing, so if you hate it - just keep to yourself!

Now, just need to figure out what to put on that blank wall (any ideas?!), add a few accessories and this room should be almost complete!