Difficulty: Beginner
So awhile back I was working on a room makeover for my daughter, Miss M. Before she was born we didn’t know we were having a girl, so we set up a neutral nursery in our new house. Fast forward a year and a half later and she still had beige walls and the same yellow and green bedding used by her three older brothers.
I decided that it was time to give her a girl room. I was thinking feminine, but she is definitely girly. That is the word for it “girly”. So enter the pink and purple and butterflies and rainbows and unicorns yadda yadda yadda. I knew I was only going to spend $50 for the whole transformation and that I would have to think outside the box to create a girly masterpiece.
The first thing I did was paint her walls a soothing lavender. I was painting over the beige that the previous owners had painted. In my haste to get the project done in just a couple days I decided not to paint the ceiling. But as I was cutting in with the lavender paint I was noticing that the previous owners were terrible at painting. They had got the beige paint up on the ceiling all the way around the perimeter of the room. I was painting right against the edge of the ceiling, but it didn’t really matter because there was already paint on the ceiling.
If I was more patient with my projects, I would’ve stopped painting with the lavender and painted the whole ceiling with a fresh coat of white. Then I could’ve come back and cut in a crisp clean line of lavender. I didn’t want to do that. Time was a ticking and I had 4 young kids that needed me for something every five seconds, so I just had to get it done.
I chose to cut in cleanly with the lavender and then find a way to deal with the beige on the ceiling. As I was tackling other areas of her room I continued to think about ways to hide, cover or distract from the messy paint job. Then it came to me while shopping at the Dollar Tree for supplies for her room. Remember, my budget was only $50, so the Dollar Tree was a life saver. I was walking past the silk flowers and thought “what if I attached those to the wall?” I didn’t really have a plan or have any idea how many flowers I would need.
I just started grabbing, figuring I would come up with a plan as I was deciding on the colors of the flowers. At first I thought that I would put them at the top of the wall around the perimeter of the room to cover the beige paint all the way around. I had no idea how many flowers that would take, but figured it would potentially eat my entire budget.
Then I thought maybe I could do clusters of flowers or bouquets and place them around the room. I decided to just start adding them to the wall and see what happened. I was fairly confident that I could somehow make it work and not have it look terrible.
I worked at it for a while strategically adding flowers and leaves, trying to create a good pattern. I would step back and look at my progress every so often, but I was not convinced. I kept thinking that this was not what I had envisioned. Then Miss M walked in and saw the flowers. She pointed, smiled and started to get excited. That was all I needed.
I finished arranging the flowers in the first corner and then copied the pattern in the remaining three corners of the room. Now the flowers don’t cover up all of the beige paint, but they distract you from looking at it. Your eyes are naturally drawn to the flower clusters in the corners and you don’t even notice the beige paint.
Try this technique to create a cool feature wall or to cover an eye sore. Imagine a whole wall covered in silk flowers. That would be very cool, but how long would that take? Someone give it a try and let me know.
Supplies
Silk Flowers
Hot Glue Gun
Glue Sticks
Scissors
Ahead of time come up with a plan for flower placement. You don’t need a blue print, just a general idea of which colors go where and the pattern. You can fine tune everything as you are working.
While your glue gun is heating up start pulling flowers off the stems. If necessary you may need to cut the plastic part that attaches the flower to the stem to make it easier to glue to the wall.
Take a flower, squeeze a bead of glue onto the back of it and attach to the wall.
Continue with other flowers repeating the pattern as necessary. I made use of the many leaves and attached some of those to the wall as well. You don’t need to cut the leaves off the stem you can just peel the silk leaf away from the plastic stem. If you are working on a ladder gluing at the top of the wall or on the ceiling take a step back every so often. Not literally, you’ll fall off the ladder if you take a step back. You need to be sure that your flower arrangement looks the way you want. You won’t be able to tell until you take a step back and look at it from a normal perspective. You won’t be standing on a ladder every time you go into that room, so you need to make sure that it looks ok from standing on the floor. Once you have glued all of your flowers be sure to pull all of the stringy spider webs of glue to clean up the look.
And then you’re done. You’ll have a cool or unusual wall treatment, that was easy to create and easy on your wallet.