We’ve spent the last three weekends painting accent walls in our condo – one in the future baby room, one in our bedroom, and one in the living room. I originally wanted to find a cute peel and stick removable wallpaper for each accent wall instead, they were pretty expensive – we also have textured walls, and many peel and stick wallpapers say to only use them on smooth walls.

So I decided to go with painting accent walls, and eventually getting wall decals to go on them. Wall decals say to wait 4-6 weeks after painting to apply, otherwise the paint will stick to the decal, so we had to do it soon in order to be able to apply decals before the baby is expected.

The first room we did was the future baby’s room, with a grey-leaning light blue. Jack had decided, from watching professionals’ instructional videos on Youtube, that we would not need to tape the corners and just be good and make straight lines instead. He failed almost immediately and had to add tape to the rest of his sections. The tape we used on the baseboard also was kind of old so it didn’t stick well, and tape dripped onto the top of the baseboard so I had to use a tiny paintbrush to fill in the rest of the baseboard to make it not look as terrible. Definitely learned quite a bit for the next two walls!

The blue comes out a bit darker in photos than it looks in person. Here is the wall with the empty cube shelf, and the wall after I put some stuff back.

I’m setting up one of the little cubes as a little dino cube. I’m still planning on adding some more stuff, but this is what it looks like now. I also edited this photo a bit so the blue is closer to what it looks like in real life. (Yes, that’s a wand up top – it’s Cho Chang’s wand)

I picked a light purple for our bedroom because purple is my favorite color. My purple hair coloring is fading a lot since I haven’t been able to get it redone due to the shelter in place, and I kept feeling the urge to just dip my hair in the paint.

We shifted stuff around in our bedroom after we painted because we’re planning on having the baby in our room at the beginning. We left room for the recliner and it actually came a week earlier than the expected arrival date, a few days after we finished painting. Since this picture I’ve added a lamp so I can cross stitch in the recliner, and I still need to get a small storage basket and small bookshelf to store baby stuff for when we’re sitting there in the middle of the night and need to grab stuff without standing up.

Finally, we painted an accent wall in our living room red. Our old Santa Clara apartment (that we were in 2011-2012) had a red accent wall – it was part of the apartment building’s options to have them paint an accent wall for you, and the previous tenant had picked a red wall. They offered to leave it and only charge us the removal fee when we moved out, so we just went with it. This was our first apartment on our own in California, so we were purchasing a bunch of new furniture, and got a red rug, red cushions, and red kitchen towels to go with the wall. We still use those now, and even got red fatigue mats for the kitchen, so I decided to continue with the color.

This was the most complicated wall because it has a doorframe, and the edges of the doorframe are curved, so we decided to wrap the paint around to the other side rather than risk not getting a clean straight line at the curve, especially since our walls are textured. The red was quite a bit more finicky than the blue and purple though – due to the texture, we’ve had to go back in a fill in white spots that the roller couldn’t get to, and those white spots were extremely obvious in the red.

It also showed overlaps very obviously, which we didn’t have problems with when doing the other colors. We actually went back in the second day and did another two layers with the roller to try to get it less patchy, because the edges and areas around the outlets and screws that we did initially with a brush were very obviously darker, and there were also darker vertical areas where there were roller overlaps. You can still kind of see darker and lighter patches now, but it’s definitely better after some additional layers. (This is all using Behr Marquee One-Coat Prime and Paint, so multiple layers weren’t necessary in the other rooms)

I’m going to wait like a week to put our wedding canvas and shelves of plushes back on the wall, in case the red rubs off onto the back of them.

Jack is very excited to finally be done with painting. He had to move everything out of the way on his own because I can’t really help him; I am 33 weeks along right now.

Bonus: Jack’s unflattering photo of me with Dragon on the recliner while eating ice cream off a bowl on my belly. Dragon is cute though.