I’m so excited. Claire and I just put the final touches on our dining room, bringing the number of finished rooms in our house up to FOUR! I’m going to let Claire do the full reveal of the room in the next post, but in the meantime, I’ll share our experiences with painting the room.

Last week, I told you about our first experiences with the wonderful world of drywall. We ended up being happy with the result, and thankful that we didn’t have to drywall a bigger area. The lower half of the room was originally decorated with beige textured wallpaper trimmed with white molding. The upper part of the walls were covered in rose floral wallpaper. This room needed a major makeover.

We decided on an electric blue color (Startling Blue from Ace Hardware) to compliment the crayon green that we had chosen for our living room. Humboldt County is gray and foggy much of the year, so we decided to put as much bright color as possible into our first floor. We liked the textured wallpaper, but the color had to go. We didn’t want roller or brush marks on the texture, so we carefully masked off the trim and floor, then borrowed a friend’s airless paint spray gun.

If you haven’t used a spray gun before, we found out they make a HUGE mess. It only took 1/2 hour to spray the room, but it took a whole day to do all of the masking. Despite our care and attention to detail, paint spray still managed to find its way into a few nooks and crannies we missed with the tape. Spraying would have been much easier if there was less trim. In the end, the wainscoting looked great. It was worth the effort.

We wanted to use a baroque-ish damask pattern for the rest of the wall above the white trim, so we scoured wallpaper websites and stores. Damask wallpaper is totally hot right now, so you’d think it would be easy to find a pattern and color that fit with our color scheme.

You’d be wrong.

Most current damask wallpaper either comes in ultra-trendy chocolate and pink color schemes that will be out of style in a year or two (if they aren’t already). Other damask wallpaper comes in a weird “pre-distressed” pattern that looks like the designer was trying to combine Versailles and a Mountain Dew ad. Wallpaper can also be CRAZY EXPENSIVE! Evidently, we have champagne taste, because everything that appealed to us was more than $100 per roll. Plan B gave us much more creative control, and it was much cheaper, but it involved a ton of labor.

We happen to own our own vinyl plotter. If you’re unfamiliar with them, they’re what professional sign companies use to cut letters and graphics out of vinyl for signs and banners. What the sign companies don’t want you to know is that vinyl cutters have become very affordable. We originally wanted to buy a small craft cutter like a Cricut, but we found a 25″ vinyl cutter for $300, which was much cheaper than the Cricut, but offered a larger cutting area. Vinyl cutters are fairly easy to use. Claire and I both use it for our art, and we wind up using it for signs every now and then. It’s easy to use a program like Adobe Illustrator to design shapes, patterns or text that can be cut with the vinyl plotter.

I tried my hand at designing a pattern, but I wound up finding a vector pattern on a stock illustration website for $10 that we liked even better.

We bought a roll of cheap masking vinyl for $60 that would cover the entire room. We used the vinyl cutter to cut the repeatable damask pattern up, and peeled away all of the areas that show up white on the illustration above. That took a LONG time.

When you apply vinyl, you also need to use transfer paper, a paper that you stick on to the non-adhesive side of your vinyl to hold it together. Then peel the adhesive backing from the vinyl and stick it to the wall. You can find detailed instructions here.

Before we applied the vinyl, we primed the drywall and painted it our electric blue color with the flattest base we could find. Then, we applied our vinyl. You can see a photo of Claire above, aligning the sheets of vinyl and peeling off the transfer paper.

After we finished applying the white vinyl to the whole room (it took several days), we painted on three thin layers of acrylic varnish with a big sponge brush. After the varnish dried, we carefully peeled up the vinyl, leaving a subtle gloss damask pattern on our flat blue wall.

It looks incredibly badass.

If you’re crazy enough to try this on your own, the possibilities are endless. In exchange for your labor, you get complete creative control. Think of this like your mother’s (or at least my mother’s) 80’s stencil project on steroids. You can design your own wall treatments using any color combinations, or you could even use flocking powder to create your own flocked wall.

Of course you don’t need to use the vinyl as a mask…..you could put the vinyl directly on the wall instead. You can buy nearly any color and finish, including glitter and glow in the dark. You can buy an inexpensive vinyl cutter through U.S. Cutter here.

Update: It looks like their store isn’t selling our inexpensive model…but they have it on their eBay store here.

Stay tuned for Claire’s reveal of our finished Danish Modern meets Baroque dining room.

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