Wednesday, July 4, 2012

The Dr. Seuss Chevron

Most of my diy-ing has all been contained in one small area of our home. Namely the closet in the second bedroom, aka the nursery. Between two cribs and the dresser/changing table, I've had to be creative with the small room. Since baby clothes are so small, I decided the closet didn't need to be solely designated for clothing. So I went to work converting it from a plain ole closet to a closet/reading and rocking nook of fantastic-ness.

This is how it began (I am terrible at remembering to take a before picture, so a little pat on the back to me!):



My first step was to paint a fun pattern on the wall, and since chevron has been blowing up on my pinterest feed, and popping up on all the blogs I like to stalk, I figured it was only natural to add a little of the trend to my project.

Actually the original idea was a herringbone pattern, inspired by this tutorial: http://www.designsponge.com/2010/09/diy-project-lauries-herringbone-wall-design.html.


I liked the idea of having three colors, because I wanted to introduce pink somewhere since a little girl will be joining my 1 year-old son in the room at the beginning of August. In the end I chickened out, afraid that pink, blue, and white would come off as too busy or garish (I was also being considerate since this is a rental, I doubted the next renter would appreciate a pink closet). I decided to stick with the blue from the bedroom walls and white. The feminine influence would have to be provided in the details.

Easily the most daunting part of the scheme was the measuring. It was tedious, confusing and time-consuming. I first painted the whole closet white, since the last time these walls were painted is long in the past and they had acquired a yellowish tint that was not flattering in the least. Then I began the dreaded measuring/taping process. I wanted fairly quick gratification, so I went big and bold with only two V's to my pattern. I divided the wall into half, penciled a semi-straight line down the middle, and then divided the halves into halves and ended with three lines penciled on the wall. Then I ditched the pencil, grabbed the painter's tape and started winging it. Semi-kidding, I did play around with the first chevron to figure out how deep I wanted the diagonal lines to be (I started at the top after reading a tip that promised if your pattern got wonky towards the bottom it wouldn't be as noticeable), once I had that figured out I just tried my best to be consistent from one row to the next. 

Somewhere along the way, I screwed up. And the tip about it not being noticeable if it went wonky towards the bottom did not hold true for me:

Well it took a day or three, but I got around to fixing that not-so-little bloop, and it still ended up kinda wonky, but the kinda wonky I was willing to live with... I didn't end up taking a final picture of the wall until I had finished another addition to the whole project so here's a preview of what I did next:


It wasn't until I was looking through my photos of the wall, that I realized how truly wonky my paint job still is... Oh well, it looks cool in true Dr. Seuss style, and I did do all this without a level or even a ruler just a pencil and a tape measure. I just made do with what I had (and being a beginner diy-er, fancy tools like yard sticks and levelers do not reside at my abode quite yet), and am going to stop apologizing now...

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