The Great Wall Stenciling.

     So. As you may or may not know, we have a house. Like an actual, it's-ours-and-not-rented house which we bought last May. Aside from the craziness of packing and moving across the Valley with a10-week-old (we won't talk about that), owning our own home meant one thing in particular for me....I could paint!! And believe me, after living our whole married life (ok, all 6 years of it at that point...) in apartments where painting was a no-go, this color-lover was ready.to.paint.
   Conveniently, in one of our two living rooms there was a blank white wall, just waiting begging to be painted with some beautiful, fresh COLOR. Somehow, I began to think it would look really really good if I stenciled it. ALL of it. So I did what I always do....I looked up wall stencils on Pinterest :) I found this company and stencil which I fell in love with. And then I bought it. Somewhere along the way I mentioned to my friend Coley that I was going to stencil the wall, and since she loves diy-ing it as much as I do and is always up for a project-she offered to come over and help.

Picture this: two girls (ok, women), 2 4-year old boys, 2-2year olds (a boy and a girl), a 4 month old, a 2-month old, and an Arizona July day. Paint. Tape. And a ladder. A recipe for craziness, not to mention lots and lots of sweat? Actually, we had a lot of fun! You can see the stencil taped onto the wall at left. I read a few tutorials on how to go about it before I started. We started in the middle of the wall, and used a level for the first one to make sure it was, well, level. It took awhile to get the rhythm of the stencil, and often one or the other of us was nursing a baby. But the big kids played beautifully together, and we stenciled our hearts out! (You can see the stencil-and the mint-green paint color I adore-hanging on the ladder up above. I picked the paint color from the rock our giant fireplace is made out of...see the picture on the far right? The one with the cute baby yawning in the quilt? That's where the whole pallet for my house is coming from, actually. The fireplace, not the baby. Ignore the cute baby in the quilt if you can and just look at the rock ;)).








Here's the wall before....great room, beautiful light, boring white wall.

The wall after...warms up the room a TON. Plus the color is beautiful!!

a better view of the mint-green

I love the way the light at different times of the day changes the wall!

As we went along, we found that since a)the pattern is interlocking and b)no wall is perfectly straight we could just trust the interlocking pattern to guide us. Coley was awesome enough to stay the whole day, so we could get as much done as possible. My husband was awesome enough to take all 4 bigger kids swimming when he came home, right around stir-crazy time. And I LOVE my wall!! I had to finish the far left side and top on my own the next day, but seriously, I think I might STILL be working on it if Coley hadn't helped! The rest of the room is slowly evolving as we work to find just the right pieces to finish it off; but it's great. And I frequently use my wall as a backdrop now :) it's such a statement wall, along with our fireplace, that so far I don't have any plans to paint other walls in the main part of the house.
Ask me about my plans for the other side of this wall, though..I'm thinking big, horizontal, warm yellow stripes in what will soon be Blythe's room. I wonder if I can convince Coley to come over...