perking up the pad

We have been living in the same house for almost 8 years now. 8 whole years! It seems like we just moved in a year ago. Ever since the first day we moved in we had been planning on painting the interior of the house in fun colors. Well, I had planned on painting fun colors. It turns out that the bosses, a.k.a. Jeremiah and his parents wouldn’t particularly love vibrant blues or deep dark red or sunshine yellow  on their living room walls. So my dreams of livening up the living room were smashed to bits. Ok, not really. I guess I agree with their philosophies of keeping the living area neutral. So now, 8 years after we talked about painting the living room I finally did it!

Here is the terrible before picture. In all of it’s messy pre-contruction glory! yowzah!

We picked out a pretty khaki grey called Stonington from Valspar. It is light enough to keep our room from looking like a cave since we don’t have a lot of natural light in this room, and it adds richness and warmth.

And, as you can see, I couldn’t leave it with just a boring coat of paint. I dreamed of damask stencils and I found a way to make it possible. The big stencils themselves normally cost about $50 each, or more! I fell in love with this design and found a way to make my own. My cutter only does 12 inches wide and the stencil needed to be 24”. I eventually ended up piecing together 4 pieces of stencil plastic I bought at Hobby Lobby. They were carefully cut and taped together to form a decent $4 substitute for the $50 stencil.

This was about the time that Mason caught a nasty virus and ended up sick with bronchiolitis for a week, putting a quick halt to my stencilling. The latter stayed up in my house for about 3 weeks while I nursed sick kids back to health. (Simon and Ryan got sick too.) And I slowly finished the wall, one print at a time.

Mason would watch baby Einstein or practice his new skill of rolling around to get where he wanted to go. He is such a good baby!

And then one day I actually finished! I love how it turned out! It looks just like I pictured it in my head.

The reason it took so long is that I had to roll on each stencil, wait for it to dry, then apply the gold accents. Then I could move the stencil to the next position.

The gold adds texture and a touch of glamour. With a house full of males it is nice to add a little feminine touch here and there.

So now you are wondering, “what did ‘the bosses’ think?” Jeremiah likes it ok, his mom loves it as much as I do, and his dad is just happy he doesn’t have to live here. haha.

 

Now to put my pictures back up and I’ll be ready to move on to the next room!