Colorful Playroom Refresh

Share via:    

This post, Colorful Playroom Refresh and DIY Striped Wall, is sponsored by Ace Hardware. Thank you for supporting the brands that keep the crafts coming! All ideas and opinions are my own.

Hello! My name is Kara Whitten.

Kailo Chic started in February 2005. I had just graduated from UT with a degree in Chemical Engineering and was ready to start working. After the first week at my new post college job, I freaked out and quit. Not the smartest thing to do, but I was scared and couldn't imagine myself working in a lab for the next 40 years. As luck would have it, I was also planning my wedding. The day I went to the fabric store to find the pattern for my wedding dress, I ended up finding a cool handbag pattern! So with the few bucks I had left, I purchased the pattern along with a little bit of fabric and went home to sew up some new bags. This is where Kailo Chic would began.

My blog, A Kailo Chic Life as a lifestyle is a component to Kailo Chic, being all about DIY, Parties, and Home Decor and how to add color to your life. My hope is this post will inspire you too. Enjoy!

Sincerly,
Kara

Guys! I am so excited to share my colorful playroom refresh and DIY striped wall with you all today! We moved into our house 4.5 years ago and aside from moving toys and furniture around, the upstairs playroom hasn't been touched since we moved in. It was always a space I wanted to decorate, but since its main function is to house toys and the room is usually a mess, I put off doing anything up there. That's where Ace Hardware comes in! They challenged me to redo the space with paint from The Paint Studio and their Clark+Kensington line since it is durable and so easy to wash, which made it perfect for a playroom. I was up for the challenge and started brainstorming ideas for how I wanted to refresh the room.

It would be easy to just paint the walls a solid color, but I really wanted to create a fun and colorful focal wall. This is a playroom after all! So I decided to paint stripes of various colors and angles to add some dimension to the space. Stripes are one of the easiest murals to do for beginners, so I figured I should give it a go.

Let's start at the beginning. All of the walls (and ceilings!) were beige when we moved in. My first step was to paint all those beige walls a nice crisp white. I used Ultra Pure white base by Clark+Kensington in an eggshell finish for this step. I also was sure to grab all the supplies I needed to complete my painting project while at Ace Hardware, including my favorite short-handled angled brush, roller, and painter's tape. What's nice is that Ace has everything you need to get started, and if you forget to grab anything in store, their Extra Mile Promise means they'll deliver anything else you need right to your door.

I began the painting process by using a short-handled angled brush to cut in the trim and ceiling, then came back and rolled on the paint. It took three coats to completely cover the beige.

Once the walls were a clean white, I used 2" painters tape to tape off lines 2" apart in sections going in different directions.

Once the tape was on the walls, I rolled over the tape with another coat of white. We have slightly textured walls, so I wanted to make sure the colored paint wouldn't bleed through the texture. A coat of white paint helped seal the edges of the paint so that I could get even paint lines. Once the white coat was dry, I started rolling on the colors. I used Clark+Kensington in some fun bright colors: Illuminated Orange (16D-4), Marine Green (30B-7), and Peanut Butter (11A-3) in eggshell. After painting a few stripes, I wanted one more color in the mix and so I mixed 4 parts Illuminated Orange, 1 part White, and 1 part Marine Green to create a bright avocado green for the last set of stripes.

Once the paint was dry, I removed the painters tape and used a small craft brush to touch up any areas that bled. Luckily that part was minimal since I did the coat of white first. I didn't want to carry the stripes through the whole space because I felt that would be overwhelming, so instead I kept the other walls white but added boxes of color that I then hung art work inside. It was the perfect amount of color to tie the wall into the stripe wall, but still simple enough not to overwhelm the room.

Now that you see how simple it is to make your own focal stripe wall, let's get to the good stuff of all the before and after photos, shall we?

Before

After

Isn't it amazing what a little paint and a few days of DIY action can do?! I think this colorful playroom refresh and DIY striped wall may just be one of my favorite home projects to date. I love quick refreshes, don't you?