The Wall

Since living in our apartment, I have had numerous comments about "the wall". Well everyone is in luck! We're decided to do something similar in our bedroom in the new house and I'm going to dedicate this post to showing everyone how it was done!

Reminder, the wall in our apartment:

Yes I did paint around bookshelves, hence the giant white space

Start by painting the walls the color you want the lines between the blocks to be. In the case of our apartment we wanted white so we skipped this step. In our bedroom we went with a tealish-blue color (it's almost Tiffany blue for the ladies to get a better idea since pictures and computer screens sometimes distort colors).

Next is to tape off the pattern. This is where you let your creativity shine (or where you call in your artsy mother to help because being an engineer you don't do random super well). Start putting tape up in squares and rectangles of all different sizes. We tried to avoid having a line that connected more than three boxes. This helped to keep the look less predictable. For the apartment I started by taping horizontal and vertical lines using a lot of measuring and a hand level (to make kind of a plaid) and then removed and added tape to make it random. In our bedroom I invested in a laser level that showed both vertical and horizontal level and skipped the plaid step. The entire bedroom took far less time to do than the single wall in our apartment, so I would highly advise the laser level.

Final step is to paint! Just like stripes, don't use too much paint on your brush and start with the brush on the tape and pull onto the wall rather than the opposite way. This will help prevent bleeding under the tape. If you are going with more than one color, I suggest opening all the colors and use your finger dipped in the paint to mark which block will be which color before painting the entire wall. This will help avoid the inevitable multiple blocks of the same color next to each other.

Then just pull the tape off the wall and touch up any bleeding there may be!