A Labor of Love

This is what our master bedroom looked like when we moved into this house in April of 2010.

I compared the paint color to this inside of a baby's dirty diaper. Unfortunately, since the other rooms in the house were pumpkin orange, fuchsia, and lime green, this one was on the bottom of the painting list. See, when we moved in we painted nearly every room in the house within 2 weeks. We got tired. I like painting, my husband doesn't. So we left our bedroom this color for almost 2 years.

Then I started seeing stenciled walls all over different blogs and on Pinterest. This was just the push that I needed to tackle this room. I asked for this stencil for Christmas. Bill and I are very practical when it comes to Christmas gifts, so this fit the bill. When I opened the stencil up on Christmas, I could hardly wait to get going on the project.

Luckily, I had the week after Christmas off from school.  This project was definitely a labor of love. I'm thrilled with the results, but its not something I would take on again any time soon! First, I had to paint the wall white. This took a coat of primer and two coats of paint to cover the do-do paint on the wall. Then it was time to stencil.

I attached a tiny level to the top of the stencil to ensure that I was level every step of the way. This definitely helped keep every thing lined up. Since I was painting the gray on top of white, I needed to do two coats in every spot. Since the coats of paint are thin, this just took waiting a few minutes after finishing the first coat to apply the second coat.

I estimate that the entire wall took about 10 hours to do. A long time? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely!!

 I feel like we are living in a fancy hotel room now. Everything else in the room looks so much better. For a total cost of about $100 for the stencil and paint, I'd say we got major bang for the buck.

 I made those two pillows for the bed also. The fabric came from JoAnn's, and while they weren't any cheaper than buying throw pillows, they are exactly what I wanted. I am in love with gray and yellow right now.

  We plan to replace the crown molding eventually in order to cover the last few inches at the top of the wall. Hopefully this will happen over the summer. Or when we find a money tree. Fingers crossed!

Have you stenciled anything? Do you still cringe and think of ugly 80's stencils whenever anyone mentions the word? I was given many strange looks when I told people that I was stenciling a wall in our bedroom. I hope these pictures cleared it all up!

Thanks for reading,
Kathleen

PS- We bought a new camera last night! It's not super fancy, but a definite upgrade. Don't the pictures look so much crisper?! I'm still playing around with it, but I can't wait to take some great pictures.

Linking up at:
Elizabeth & Co.