Is the paint in your child’s room a little boring? Maybe you have a solid accent wall, or possibly the room is all one color? Below we will go over an easy and inexpensive way to add some style to that boring room that will have your child beaming with excitement! We’ll cover what we think will help make this an exciting and enjoyable process that you can do in a weekend or less.
There are many options when deciding to paint your child’s room. You can scour the internet for ideas, or you can use your own imagination, the sky’s the limit! There’s everything from a simple half and half color split on the wall, to geometric mountains with snow caps, to some extreme color variations with crazy shapes. I’m sure if you look around you can find plenty of inspiration for your project.
In this blog we’ll go over how we completed our project. Hopefully there will be plenty of ideas, tips and tricks that you can use to bring your own unique ideas to life. Let your creativity run with this one and I’m sure you and your child will be very happy with the result!
Overview
For this room painting blog we’ll provide details on how we accomplished our project, along with a list of needed tools and other helpful things. We’ll include how and why we chose our design and ways we made the project easier on ourselves to make the room look as amazing as possible.
Tools and Other items needed:
- Paint
- Mixing sticks
- Paint can opener or flat screwdriver
- Paint rollers (make sure these all have the same nap so the texture is the same throughout)
- Roller trays
- Paint brushes for corners and tight spots
- Cup for paintbrush
- Painters tape (we used 1 and 2 inch)
- Utility knife and new blades
- Drop cloth
- Tack cloth
- Wall repair patch kit
Get Your Design Ideas
After you have an idea of what you want to create, or maybe even a few ideas it’s time to decide how you want to lay out your design. Start with the prep work listed below and you may save some time on how and where you decide to paint.
Now The Prep Work
Move It Out
This probably goes without saying, but you’ll want to remove the furniture and everything from the walls that will be in your way for this project. We only removed things that we knew would be in the area we’d be painting, just to save some time. You can see in some of the pictures that we didn’t remove everything from the walls for this one.
Patch And Sand Smooth
Once you’ve removed the furniture and wall hangings, you can start patching holes. Remove any nails, screws and drywall anchors that you do not plan to reuse after the paint is complete. Use the wall patch repair kit, as it contains everything needed to quickly and easily patch the holes. Follow the directions on the kit and you can’t go wrong. After the drywall patch dries completely, sand everything smooth or you’ll see the patch work through your paint! (Tip: If your new design will not cover these patched areas, you’ll need to touch them up with the existing wall paint color)
Clean Your Wall
Use a damp rag or some tack cloth to make sure you remove any dust or other dirt that may be on the wall. Skipping this step could make your new paint have a less than ideal finish.
Tape Off The Trim
Before you start laying out your design, it’s not a bad idea to use painters tape to tape the top of your base trim so that you do not accidentally paint it. Also you can tape the ceiling and wall corners if you’re worried about getting paint on those areas as well. (I’m not the best painter so I taped the ceiling corners)
Use Your Drop Cloth
This is a good time to set up your drop cloth. Once our base board was taped up we laid out our drop cloth and taped it right to the other painters tape we had put on top of our base trim. Be sure not to leave any base trim exposed at this point.
Paint Your Background
If you plan to change the background color of your walls that will have your new design, this is the time to do it. You should have cleaned and taped everything off at this point so it should be as simple as rolling on your new paint, trimming in the corners and letting it dry so you can start your design lay out.
Let’s Get Started!
Lay Out Your Design
This is the fun part! For our project we just wanted something that looked a bit like spotlights coming from the floor as you can see from the pictures. We were able to do is use the existing wall color for our background, and by doing so allowed us to make our design layout cover all of the spots we patched so that we didn’t have to touch up the wall before we started.
We used a pencil to lightly mark the base of our wall where we wanted our “beam” to start. Then we lightly marked the top of our wall where we wanted the beam to stop. We didn’t have an exact size with each “beam” so we just marked what we thought would be a good width on top, somewhere between 12-20 inches with each one. We pulled the tape tight to use it as a straight edge and stuck it to the wall just outside of our marks. (This was so that when we painted we would be painting over the pencil marks) Be sure to go over your tape edges and make sure they’re pressed down firmly so that no paint leaks under them.
We continued making more “beams” across the wall, making sure not to go overboard with too may and overcrowding the wall. We overlapped many of them so that it created the crossing patters you see in the pictures. When we’d get to corners, we’d let the tape naturally guide us around them so that the “beam” would continue up the next wall. We also tried to make sure we would be putting the new design over the areas we patched.
Cut Out The Overlap
Where the painters tape overlapped, we had to cut it out so that the “beams” would cross without having lines in them. To do this we used a razor blade to lightly cut along the inside of our tape and remove the tape that was inside the area we wanted to paint.
Time To Paint
Once we had our layout done, our trim taped where we needed it, and our walls taped up with our designs, we began to paint. We were careful when painting around any trim and the ceiling so we didn’t accidentally paint areas that weren’t suppose to get painted. We rolled on the larger areas with a small roller and used a small paintbrush for any corners and tight spots our roller wouldn’t fit.
Watch The Paint Dry
Just kidding! But you do want to let the paint dry completely before trying to remove your tape. If you try to remove the tape too soon, it could peel off some of the fresh paint and cause you to have to touch it up. Also, when removing the tape while the paint’s still wet can cause the paint to string when you pull the tape off and you may end up with little strings of paint on your background.
Remove The Painters Tape
Once the paint had sufficiently dried we started to remove the tape which allowed us to really begin to see our project come to life. The new paint design came out great and our son absolutely loved it, making the entire project more than worth the time and effort put into it.
Move Back In
Now it was time to move everything back into the room. We decided to add more super hero themed decor to the room since that’s what our son loves. We grabbed a few new pieces of wall art from the local hobby store along with some posters and a couple of shelves for the walls. These extra touches really set the room up to be an area our son loves and wants to play in all the time. It also tied everything together and gave it a creative theme.
Thanks for reading our blog! We hope you got some great information and your project goes well. Feel free to reach out if we can help with anything and we hope to see you again! Good luck with all your future Home-Edits!