One Room Challenge Week 4: A room with a view

Hi there! I’m participating in this fall’s One Room Challenge. Check out all the makeovers here, and read my previous posts here, here, and here.

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You know when you think a painting project won’t take long, but it ends up lasting the whole day?

Well, that—gloriously—wasn’t the case this time. Yippee!

One of the bigger projects in my boys’ bedroom was adding a mountain skyline, if you will. Here was my inspiration:

But to make it as easy (and subtle) as possible, I decided to use the wall color for the background and paint the mountains the same white as the baseboards. In other words, drips down low wouldn’t show. Here’s a reminder of the wall I was painting:

All in, this project took less than two hours, and it doesn’t look horrible either.

One of my big beefs with painter’s tape is that it never leaves crisp paint lines. But using a tip from my sister, I got just the look I was hoping for. Take a look at this:

Wowza, that’s clean.

So here’s a quick how-to for this project:

First of all, getting sharp points for the “valleys” of the mountain range was pretty easy once I figured it out. I made sure all my tape pieces extended past the point where they intersected, then I used a ruler and pencil to trace exactly where I’d need to cut the tape to get the points I wanted. The whole draw-a-line-with-a-pencil trick is a favorite when I wallpaper too. Then I peeled up the tape and cut off the extra with scissors.

Once the tape was positioned and adhered securely, I painted over the tape’s edge with the same color that was already on the wall (SW Canvas Tan). This is the secret to crisp lines! So the tan went up first, just enough to trace the mountain line and overlap a little onto the tape.

When that was dry, I added two coats of white paint to match the baseboards, peeled off the tape, and I was done. Here’s the “after” shot again:

I will need to touch up a couple spots where the tape weirdly pulled up the base coat of paint, but other than that, I’m ready to move one. And when I say, “Move on,” I mean figure out how to incorporate these marquee letters into the room.

Next week should be fun with a little more décor stuff. Until then, check out the other ORC participants and let me know what you think about accent walls. I’m usually not a big fan, but this mountainscape does make me happy—and when it doesn’t, I’ll paint the wall tan again. •