The Arrow Points Down

Recently I’ve been falling in love with all the photos of patterned walls I’ve been finding everywhere. It seems that wallpaper is slooooowly weaselling its way back into people’s homes. For good reason though! Have you seen the amazing patterns and textures companies have been coming out with in recent years? LOVING THEM. Like a crap load. Kudos to all you peeps who have big enough…..hearts to welcome wallpaper into your home. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from peeling wallpaper off of my bathroom walls when I was a teen. It was enough to make think “no fricken way will I ever have wallpaper in my house, EVER”. Funny though how your tune changes as you age and your tastes ‘mature’, haha!

Well, you can guess what probably happened next. I went wallpaper hunting all over the Internet & I mean ALL over. So many pictures of samples that I loved, yet they all seemed to be sold out or upon closer inspection not exactly what I was looking for.

Queue the lightbulb. Why not create my own patterned wall with paint? Easy enough, I had tried one in our previous home & it turned out good, so why not again. I’ll tell you why not. I’m famous for seeing something, thinking it will be quick and easy and then…..it’s not. This was a little bit like that. Just a little.

I bit the bullet and decided that I would tape off an arrow print on a small wall that houses the door to our main floor powder room. Small enough to try something new and just big enough to make an impact. Aaaaaaaand if worse came to worse it wouldn’t be too bad an area to paint over if the whole thing bombed out. Oh, I forgot to mention that Eric was so not on board with this project. I ended up going super hard on it after he fell asleep on the couch! Poor guy didn’t know what hit him when he woke up.

Anyways, here’s how it went….

I chose the first spot for my line at random and then spaced each line 12″ apart and worked my way out on either side. Easy enough.

Next came the arrowhead portion of  the program. I knew I wanted 3 arrows pointing down so I took a piece of tape and played with the placement until I liked what I saw. I spaced the lines 1″ apart and then using a level drew a line across the vertical line so I knew where to place the tape on the other side.

The bottom arrow is space 16″ from the tip of the base to the centre of where the arrow below it starts. This made is super easy to figure out where I needed to start and end my tape when placing the line.

I measured 3″ from my center vertical line and then again using the level held it vertical through the angle pieces and marked where I needed to cut. I just used scissors to cut my lines and place them back down.

I didn’t want my arrowheads to line up with the line next to it so I opted to stagger them a bit and repeated the above steps until the wall was complete. All in all once I figured out my numbers and measurements it took probably 2 & a half hours total to tape everything…..and that’s only for a small wall! I was having a hard time explaining the slope so here’s a picture that should clear up the confusion.

I took the above picture at an angle so it doesn’t look like it matches up, but it does! Believe me, I’ve never done so much measuring in my life. Here’s how it looked once it was all taped off.

AHHHHHHHH! So exciting! For my base color, I used what was already on the walls. It’s ‘Rockport Gray’ by Benjamin Moore & it’s pretty much my favourite gray EVER. I painted ‘Hotelware’ from the Style at Home line of Paint for Beauti-tone Paints over top my decal.

Drumroll please……

I’m loving how it turned out. Only a few minor touch ups were needed to the gray, but overall it was pretty smooth going project! It gives me some relief knowing that when I tire of it I can just paint over it instead of having to peel away wallpaper. Oh & don’t mind the lack of baseboards, it’s on our summer to do list & I’m hoping by keeping them off it will kick start the drive to get them done!

Now the next decision is….what color do I paint the door?