Nursery herringbone wall

For the nursery, we (I, really) wanted to do some kind of statement wall that was bright and fun and that would be something our kid could grow up with.  I found this wall on pinterest months ago and saved it for inspiration. I liked that it was fun and I loved that it was imperfect. The herringbone lines don't match up, so I wouldn't have to measure and panic if things didn't look perfect. 

our inspiration

Honestly, I didn't look for any tutorials or diy walk through's because I figured it couldn't be that hard and I just barreled on ahead. Looking at other tutorials now, they have some pretty great pointers that would have been helpful. Whoops. I'll fill you in on what I missed though.

First off, we painted the whole wall white since that's the color we wanted for the stripes.  We had to paint two layers since the original pink paint in the room was stubborn.  Then, we measured the room to figure out how wide each herringbone section would be.  The wall is 190 inches long, so we simply divided that and chose to do ten 19 inch sections. We measured each section and made a small mark at the top and bottom of the wall.

To make the vertical lines, Trevor stood on a stepladder and lined up painting tape with the line we drew.  He held the tape tight to the wall as I let out more tape and lined it up with the mark at the bottom of the wall. It worked well and made pretty straight lines. We used tape that was about an inch wide so that that stripes wouldn't be large and overpowering.

I was picky about how deep/shallow I wanted the herringbone lines. I decided to make a guide out of cardboard so all the lines would be sloping at the same angle. I took an old cereal box and eyeballed an angle as a drew it against a ruler. I cut out along the line and had two angle guides. 

I would line up the long vertical end of the cereal box guide with the vertical tape lines Trev and I put down. We would then tape a slope following the guide. These guides were a life saver since I'm such a perfectionist.

After all the slopes were taped, we began to paint. We knew we wanted to have a few random yellow blocks, so we painted those first. We didn't need a lot of yellow, so we just grabbed a sample jar at Lowe's.  

For the green, we used Pantone's Emerald Green paint.  We already had a gallon jug of it because we used it in our entry way. It only took two coats for the green to look even and vibrant. After waiting a day and a half, we peeled the painting tape off the wall to reveal the herringbone pattern. 

(whoops, please excuse that weird roll of toilet paper in the frame... my allergies have been rough this spring!)

The painting tape didn't give us too much trouble and there were only a few spots where the green or yellow paint bled through and we had to retouch with white paint. The walls in our house are uneven in some spots through, so it may have been our walls that were the problem instead of the tape. There were a lot of tutorials that suggested using Frog Painters tape for the stripes, but we didn't have a problem with good ol' 3M painter's tape. Some tutorials also suggested putting a coat of white on top of the tape as well as underneath the tape, but I don't really understand what that would do. I'm happy I didn't do that because it just sounds like double the work.

Even though this wall was so much extra work and effort, it was absolutely worth it. I love how unique it is and how it brightens up the whole room. We can't wait to fill up the nursery more!

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