When your mind frees up and gets a little white space, you can see things in a new light. This is continually something I am amazed by as I go through the seasons of life. I showed you in my snow room remodel, how this idea looked after closing our art studio. As I come out of a heavy season of launching my online course, my mind is once again a little more free and I have been able to create a new floral hallway mural in our home.
The wall has had many different looks over the years.
We have used it to as our our own family’s Instagram reel as we add pictures to it over a year to highlight some of of our favorite memories made. Reagan has also painted an under water mural on it, and then we tried to add the pictures back on top, once we were tired of it. The pictures didn’t like sticking to her acrylic paint, so they kept falling off and we just never really did anything to change it.
I knew I needed a fun, creative project after I wrapped up my course launch and it hit me one day, as I was sitting on our living room couch staring down the hallway. That little spot needed fixing. I had to decide if I wanted to paint it solid to go back to holding pictures again or to create a new mural. You can see I choose to paint a new mural. I talk about the process and show more in these three YouTube videos. Check them out, if you want to see the action happen and how many times my dogs and kids walk past me as I painted :).
Video 1: The Start of a New Mural
Video 2: Mural Progress Update
Video 3: Mural Reveal
I’ll go into a few more details below, to walk you through my process, but in summary you can see the wall transformation quickly in this picture combo.
Step 1: Clean and prepare the wall
The first step was to take down all the pictures. It was fun to relive those moments, as I pulled each picture off the wall. I then sanded the wall quickly to erase any lumps of paint from Reagan’s mural.
Next, I wiped down the wall and gave it a coat of Kilz primer to neutralize an even surface once again.
Step 2: Begin to design
After I did all the prep work, it started to get fun.
I knew I wanted to paint some kind of floral design, but I didn’t want it as symmetrical and perfect as I did on this previous bedroom mural. One of my goals was to create a bigger scale and for the layout to not be even. I began by sketching the design out in pencil on the wall. Next time, I will sketch it on paper first, so there are not as many pencil marks. Those turned out to be tedious to cover in the yellow and lime paint.
Once the image was roughly on the wall, I was ready to cut it in with the base color. Since my base color was so dark, I didn’t want to paint the whole wall with it. I just kind of painted around my design, so I created a coloring page for me to fill in.
Step 3: Add the color and final details
This is where it begins to get really fun! I started doing one color at a time to get everything filled in. Once I did that in spacing out the colors, I started going over the colors with a second layer and then I wrapped it up with a few details on top of some of the design.
This incorporated new colors or mixing my current colors with other colors to make different shades.
When I was trying to decide about a color or if a shape was the right size, I would stand back and stare at it. At one point, Caleb, walked through talking to me and the moment was too cool not to capture.
It was actually hard to decide which shapes to give more details too. I could have kept going with details, but I didn’t want it to feel too precise. I wanted some whimsical aspect, so I just added enough details to make some of the blander shapes pop.
Enjoy your Creation!
Now that the wall is done and it looks so good, it’s hard to believe we left it at such a rough spot for so long.
That’s what happens with a full mind though. We get used to seeing things a certain way. Other aspects of life take over your attention and thoughts, and you just settle in.
It may be a matter of not having enough time to get to that project or you are just so use to seeing it that way, you forget there could be anything wrong with it.
Have you wanted to draw or paint on your walls?
I love the intentional care to this forgotten spot in our home. It now looks so happy and makes me smile every time I see it. I’m racking my brain on what other spot in our home could use a little attention. I few ideas that come to mind are…
- kids’ bathroom cabinets
- kids’ bathroom walls/floor
- pantry walls
- master bathroom closet
- kitchen accent wall
- laundry hook wall
These areas could just use some organization or maybe a simple paint job. OR maybe I should paint some more murals. That really was so fun. Have you ever wanted to paint or draw on your walls. We grow up being told not to do so, but then we forget when we are grown and have our own house…that we get to make the rules. It’s like one of those habits or ways of thinking you just keep going with because it’s what you have always known. If you want to try something, I say…go ahead and do it.
Be a Crazy One
Your idea might seem crazy. You might fail at it. I certainly “messed” up as I painted this mural. There were even some big “oops” where paint got on a different wall and the carpet, but it’s nothing a little hot water and soap didn’t fix.
I learned and now I know what to be more careful with and to do differently next time. Anything worth wild or that comes to life first takes imagination. It can be crazy to see something differently, but maybe that leads to something beautiful.
Have you done something that filled your heart up recently? I know I need creative fixes after big projects or seasons that are stretching. Painting has always been a great brain break for me. If you need help figuring out your own brain break, I’d love to journey that with you in my Create More Connection Course. Enroll today and we can get started.
Now, what do you think? Are you ready to draw on your walls too? Maybe start by just looking around your home and deciding what is one area that you have gotten use to seeing in that way, and it could be so much more.
Have fun and imagine the possibilities!
Have you ever looked at something and seen it all of a sudden completely different?
It was such a cool moment to mentally process the margin I was working hard to find-I was finding. If you listened to Matt and I share 
I love to work on our house. It is part of how this blog began 14 years ago, by sharing my projects with all of you. Yet, as running an art studio took over my time, I have found I have not worked on or done a project on our house in a long, long time.
This room isn’t very big, so I did half the room at a time. Whichever half was not getting worked on, kept all the furniture piled up.
I then went to shake the gallon of cement stain and the lid wasn’t on all the way. Stain went flying on my freshly painted trim and walls. I wasn’t even mad though. I felt alive.
This room reminded me that creating is a muscle and it needs practice and margin to grow. We can’t live extremely stressful and busy lives and expect to come up with our best ideas, most creative dreams, and to see everyday things differently. Just like athletes need to rest after a big game, our brains, souls and creative spirits need to recharge as well.
What about you? Do you need to create margin in your life? You may not need to go as extreme as I did with changing up your career. You can form a new habit by switching out an old one.
We only have one life. I am encouraged how one of my favorite writers, Bob Goff, said “he choose the life he wanted and placed work around it- rather than choosing a job and trying to squeeze a life into it.”
One day I was drinking a tea and started flipping through a book I flip through often for inspiration. It sits on a side table to be a quick read. As I was thumbing through it for the 100th time, I had the thought, “I wish I could see all the pages at once. They are so beautiful.” Almost as quick as the thought came, it was followed by thinking of my accent wall I had been trying to figure out. Could these book pages be collaged in a way to make wallpaper?
I really didn’t give it any time or research before knowing I wanted to try my idea. I started ripping my beloved book up page by page. Once I had ripped out all the pages, I had a huge stack of beautiful paper. I used scissors and cut off all the frayed edges. I was then ready to figure out the wallpaper method.
I taped a few pages up in different directions to figure out if I wanted a messy scattered look or if I wanted it to look more like organized rows. I decided I liked the messy look. I went to Lowes and asked where the wall paper paste was located. To my surprise, there was a roller of wallpaper paste made for doing wallpaper boarders. It was the perfect size for my project! It was a small bottle with a roller to easily apply the paste to my book pages.
Most of the pieces didn’t need to be trimmed. I simply picked a page and decided which side of it I liked best, and rolled my wallpaper paste onto the side that would be up against the wall. I rotated the piece of paper different little angles so it didn’t look perfect and pressed it onto the wall. I then used the smoothing tool and pressed all the wrinkles and air bubbles out.
A few little things I thought through as I worked…
It was really messy. I used a huge old sign and placed it on the floor as my mobile work space, and it had gluey wallpaper paste all over it. I probably could have sorted my pages out to have a stack of images vs. a stack of quotes, etc, but I didn’t. The creative in me decided to just go for it. Some of you organized folks will probably have a much more calculated way to go about it, which is great!
I love how it all came together! It’s so colorful and fun! The book, How to be a Wildflower by Katie Daisy, costs $11.46 on Amazon. I ended up buying two books from there. What an inexpensive way to buy wallpaper we love, to brighten up a small space!
This door leads into our garage. It is the most used door in our house. We can see this little nook from our kitchen, which is part of why I wanted to brighten up the space! It is also our walk through laundry room into my craft room. This small nook is one high traffic space!
I love how these beautiful pages are perfect for inspiration and deep conversations. The other day I was sitting at the table with my kids, and I asked them what they thought one of the pages meant when it said, “gather unlikely friendships.” It has led into some of the most real, challenging, and beautiful conversations.
This little nook is a well used space in our home, and now as we come and go and just live…we can be inspired. It’s a small wall with a huge punch.
There’s a few features that quickly had me fall in love with the house. One of them is the huge, flat backyard with a woods and a creek. I know there will be lots of sports played on that grass and I can’t wait for the kids to go trumping through that creek this spring. We want to build a bridge over the creek to the woods too. Our last house did not have a good backyard, and we really didn’t want to make that mistake again.
If you turned left in the living room, you would go down a hall way to a bathroom and two bedrooms. Reagan will get one bedroom and the boys will share the other.
Reagan’s bedroom came with an electric fireplace. She is thrilled :).
The boys bedroom was the previous owners’ office, so there are lots of lights and closet space!
Since we don’t have a basement, a lot of storage stuff will be in our guest room closet. At our last house we stored a lot of the school, games stuff in that closet. I’m so excited that the boys have two closets and one can be dedicated to holding lots of those bigger toys and games now.
All those windows are a dream! When we wake, we all find our way to this room. Matt and I drink our coffee in here and the kids play beside the fire. It’s amazing!
The master bedroom is off the kitchen. It has a little walk through with a desk and closets till you get in it. Matt and I have our own closets. We “temporarily” set up our tv in that little nook, so we have been watching movies as a family on our bed. We might have to get another tv for the living room, but I also like the cuddles so maybe we wont :).
If you walked through the kitchen, you go into the laundry room that also leads into the garage.
Also, tucked back there is my new craft room!
There’s huge windows and our pups can even fit through that doggie door. I wish I had made a video of us teaching the dogs to go in and out it. That was pretty funny!