3 Easy Ways to Make Your Walls Come to Life
We have officially entered the halfway mark of the One Room Challenge! Welcome to week 3! If you’re just joining me and would like to catch up, please click here to see Week 1 and here for Week 2.
Week 1 (the plan) // Week 2 (the planter hack) // Week 3 (that wallpaper tho’!) **YOU ARE HERE // Week 4 (pink chair covers) // Week 5 (zebra shades) // Week 6 The Reveal
For everyone else, grab a cuppa your favorite sumthin’- sumthin’ because I’ve got lots to share with you! Today’s discussion is all about the walls.
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Everyone knows that paint is the easiest and least expensive way to transform the walls of any room. But what if your room still leaves you with a lack luster feeling even after applying a paint color that excites you? That is precisely the situation in which I found myself with the two spaces I’m making over.
My solution was to layer my walls as I would rugs or clothing. Here are a few ways I went about doing that.
Tips for Waking Up Those Boring Walls
1. Add Amazing Art
While commercial art has certainly come along way, so has our accessibility to original artwork. Sites like Etsy make having unique pieces of art so affordable.
Recently I discovered an exceptional Etsy artist, Natalie Osborne, who’s work was everything I envisioned for my dining room: unique and modern, fresh yet vintage. Imagine how excited I was to learn that she was located in the Chicagoland area? Natalie and I had an awesome face-to-face meeting and photo session earlier this week, which I promise to cover in a separate post. At the end of our meeting I walked away with these two edgy pieces of art for my dining room.
2. Create a Mixed Photo and Art Gallery
Art is cool. People are works of art. Using photographs and drawings of people you actually know is the coolest art to have on your walls. I’m not talking about celebrities, presidents or historical figures. I’m talking about your family. So often, we plop down hundreds, even thousands of dollars for paintings of people we don’t even know.
As I was writing this piece I thought back to my blogger buddy in Germany who, a couple of years back, took photos of her grandmother’s hands while visiting her in Morocco. She had the photo enlarged, framed and mounted on a wall in her home. As it turns out, that trip was the last time she would see her grandmother. Do you think that inexpensive piece of self-made art was more meaningful to her than anything else she had purchased for her home? You bet it was!
While doing a bit of research on my own family history, I came across many old, beautiful photos. This was not the first time I had seen some of them. My grandmother kept a small selection of photos on her fireplace mantel. They served as “talking points” for conversations with other family members and visitors. Thus, from the time I was a child, I knew what several of my long gone family members looked like, where they lived and how they made their living.
As I sifted through my family’s historical paper trail, I was able to match people in never before seen photos to the faces in the photos that I had already become familiar with seeing. It was a dizzying amount of information. But how exciting! I decided that creating a gallery wall that blends “real people art” with my tiny art collection would be a great touch to this space. Below are photos of my grandmother and great-grandparents.
I wanted to showcase these photos in an affordable but honorable way. After searching everywhere, I stumbled across these contemporary frames during a visit to an art store called Blick. The 9x12 frames were a steal at $8.50 each plus free shipping. The 11x14 frame in the center was slightly more at $15. Blick Rewards members placing online orders that exceed $59 get an additional 10% off + free shipping. Can’t beat that with a stick.
3. Add a Statement Wall Paper
Boy do I love a good statement wall! There is at least one on each floor of my home. In my basement I painted a striped wall. If you were with me during the fall 2017 ORC you know that I used wallpaper for a portion of my hallway. In this makeover I will use wallpaper yet again.
This is by far the most daring and opulent wallpaper I’ve ever installed. A special thanks to folks over at Osborne & Little for allowing me to experience this luxurious product! It’s a damask printed, velvet true flock wallpaper from the Dryden collection. The color of the velvet varies from subtle to vibrant depending on the direction of the sunlight. I’ve literally seen this wallpaper change into 3-4 different shades of fuchsia pink in one day! Each shade is just as beautiful as the next.
Don’t worry, you’ll get a chance to have a better look at all of these elements in the finished room. For now I have a really long list of things to do that I need get serious about.
To Do List:
o Build cornice with trim for patio door
o Paint trim and molding
o Install new zebra shades
o Reupholster ottomans
o Rework artwork for living room & finish gallery wall
o Add chair covers
o Purchase small side table
o Add more lighting
I’m excited to know what you think. Please feel free to tell me in the comments below! Thank you for stopping by!
One Room Challenge Schedule:
Week 1 // Week 2 // Week 3 (you are here) // Week 4 // Week 5 // Week 6 The Reveal
