Melinda's Musings: Apartment Update: Accent Wall Before & After

Need a little uplift to your living room? How about an accent wall?! Taz and I painted one small wall in my living room this weekend. I decided to take the chance of just painting one section of our living room a bright color and keeping the rest of the walls white.

Why paint just 1 wall?

1. I rent and don't want to be stuck re-painting the whole apartment white again!

2. Paint is more expensive than I realized! I wanted to avoid having to purchase enough paint to cover 9 foot high walls that wrap around into the kitchen.

This was a great budget-friendly way to brighten up the main room of our apartment. (Which functions as a living room/dining room for me, my 2 roommates, and our 3 boyfriends!). For our 9x5 ft wall space we only needed 1 bucket of paint (we bought one with the primer already in it), and we had more than enough to also paint a 3x2 ft bookcase!

Here's what the wall looked like...

I really loved my gold-framed DIY 'pictures' that I had put together years ago with old inspirational calendar pages, felt fabric, and decorative paper. However, I apparently never loved them enough to do a decent job of hanging them in a straight line. This photo is a little exaggerated but they've been hanging in a slightly crooked manner for over 4 years now.

I was planning on replacing these frames with 3 beautiful paintings from Spain that hung in my grandparents' living room for years. Taz did an excellent job of plotting exactly where they would lay out, measuring the wall, the paintings, and creating a to-ratio-drawing on scrap paper. The color I ended up deciding on reflected color elements in the artwork. Here's the final look...