My Zero Dollar Kitchen Makeover

I know, it's Monday.  Hardly a reason to smile.

Hey, wanna see something depressing?  Maybe it will make you feel better.

This long, blank wall in my kitchen.  I hate this wall.  I tried to make it cuter with the chalkboard and my aprons, but I'm still bored with it.

Wanna know something depressing?

My home improvement budget for the rest of this month is $0.

Robin gets me.

Also, I didn't have very much work going on last week, so I had a lot of time on my hands.

Boring wall + $0 + lots of time = wall stencil.  (At least in this case it did.)

All I needed was:
Paint (I used leftover latex from painting my cabinets, but even acrylic craft paint will work!)
Craft brush
Stencil (I made one out of a cereal box)
Pencil
Did I mention the total cost?: $0  cha-ching!

I found the template for the stencil on this blog, and scaled it to full page before printing.  Then I cut it out, traced onto my cereal box, and cut it out again.  All cut out, my stencil was about 8"x10".

One thing I wished I had paid more attention to was where to begin. This is important! Measure both the width and height of your wall to make sure you won't end up with any weird edges... like having only 1/4 of your stencil along the top of the wall.  I ended up with 8.5 stencils going up and down my wall (8ft ceilings).  If only I had done this more "exactly" instead of "good enough"... you'll see what I mean.

I made sure the stencil was level, then traced around it.  I did this about 4-5 times and I couldn't help it any more... I started to paint.  Plus, tracing gets really old really quick.

Eh.  I was unsure of my decision.  Plus, this is very time consuming!  But since I had nothing if not time, I pressed forward, just to see what would happen.  Stencil a couple, paint a couple.  Stencil a few more, paint a few more.

Let's just say I'm thankful for Netflix.  Dr. Brennan keeps some good company (Bones reference.  You should watch it.)

Jumping back to the whole measuring business - I had to "stretch" the stencils at the bottom to prevent having a weird partial stencil along the bottom.  At the top, I had a half stencil... if I had shifted everything down and inch or two, I think it would be a cleaner end product.

Also, I'm a couple inches off between the cabinets.  See how the one gap is larger than the other?  I could just stencil all the way to the cabinet and maybe no one will notice.  In fact, probably no one notices except me anyway, so I may just leave it.

And I love it.  I can see this fun wall from the dining room.  And living room.  And master bedroom.  It gives a fun, trendy, totally reversible kick of character that changes the mood in the whole house.

I promise my kitchen is not actually so limey!  It's a perfectly acceptable green that is not showing in this photo.

And best of all, it was free.

Swoon.

That's it for me today... I'm off to go stare at my wall! ;) Have a good week you guys!

posted by Emma