Come stencil with me!

 

When I started playing around with idea of painting our entire first floor, minus the kitchen and bathroom, I was not crazy about the idea of giving up our red accent walls.

Be advised, all the pictures I am sharing with you today will show that our house is a mess!  Sorry bout that.  I've been painting since Wednesday and still have a few things to do (doors, stairwell) so I can't put anything away yet! 

I like how the red accent walls broke up all that tannish-brown color.  It worked for me, for a while.

Until I started hating the colors, loathing them.

Well, the red is kind of nice.  But so 5 years ago.

The thought of having the WHOLE house gray, while nice, sort of made me nervous.  Is it too much gray??  Then, when searching around Pinterest, I found this blog, which had the following picture.  From there, I found this blog, which is the original that has the stencil, if you are interested.

 

Oh, that is pretty!  That is what I thought.  I had considered a cool stylish wallpaper, but let's face it, with our basement possibly going to cost $14,000 to fix (um, yeah...) we don't have the money to be throwing around on fancy wallpaper right now!  At least, not until school starts again and I get a paycheck.  This stencil, though, is cheap.  As in free.

I thought to myself, "I can do that!!! Plus, it is FREE!"  I already have the paint, so all I had to do is download and print the stencil and follow the directions.  No problem!!  I painted the accent walls gray yesterday, took 2 coats of our Olympic paint and primer in one, instead of 1 coat (like the rest of the walls, seriously love this paint!!)  When that dried, I traced the stencil on the walls and painted it.  It took me over 12 hours to do the tracing and painting, but it was worth it.  We have a beautiful wall now.  Let's let the pictures do the talking.  Again, don't mind the mess, or the two different lighting styles, some of the pics were taken at 2am this morning (darkness) and some were taken like...10 minutes again (morning).  That is how our gray looks in different light!  It's lovely!

My lines are thicker then that Pinterest picture above, I think it's the brush I used?  I had a really nice art brush and I used that because I wanted the lines to be really clean and professional looking...

I see so many flaws in the wall, it's hard to get the stencil perfect, human error comes in to play, but Dave says he doesn't notice any flaws.  He luuuurves it!

I love the way it looks with red!!  Yummy!

I'll probably change out some of the stuff on this shelf too.

Morning light.  This is truer to the real color.  Secret Passage.

Just look at that wall!  It's beautiful!

Our furniture is too matchy right now, but don't worry, I am going to paint and re-fab the chairs.

Here is the living room, don't mind the empty walls I have to re hang pics.

A shot from the front door that we never use.  BTW, that clock is getting a makeover;)

The gray paint is satin and the white is a semi-gloss, so it has just a little bit of shine.  I just used the same white that is on our trim/doors-to-be.

So that is our accent wall!  What do you think?  I'll type more about the process later, but if you are dying to know, just click on the links above to see how they did it.  

I LOVE IT!