DIY wallpaper template

I’m taking my time with deciding how to decorate each area of our home. I’m still up in the air about a lot, but one thing I sporadically did on the weekend when Cora was having lunch was make a wallpaper template and quickly paint a small wallpaper-style pattern on the peek of wall under our stairs.

I painted this section burgundy during my lunch break a few weeks ago. I think I did it to make myself feel like I was making an update to our home [I currently have hundreds of ideas, but there are so many moving pieces and things have to be done in a certain order, therefore I’m getting nothing done].

I then had the idea to paint a faux wallpaper effect*, just to see if it’s something I’d like to do. Using an empty cereal box, I cut out a square template. I folded it in half each way to find the center of the square. I marked the center and four corners with a pencil and then I laid the cardboard template on a folded up kitchen cloth and used my drill to carefully drill 5 holes. Yes, I could have used something else to make the holes, but it was literally within reach and there’s nothing I love more than being lazy.

Then I simply used my template to mark lightly with a pencil the pattern on the wall. Once you do one row, simply line up the template with existing pencil marks to make sure your lines are consistent. That’s it! It was so easy and fast to make. I painted little gold hearts as my pattern. They’re super imperfect, but I like that.

And yes, I’m hoping to paint our entire hallway like this. Because I’m a glutton for punishment.

*I’ve been seriously thinking about wallpapering our hallway for some time, but I cannot decide on a wallpaper. I’m way too indecisive. Plus, wallpaper is expensive and we’d need a fair amount to go up the stairway. So I’m going to try my hand at painting some.

Current obsession: German Schmearing

No, German schmearing is not a sex position. That I know of. German schmearing, otherwise known as lime washing or whitewashing, is a treatment for updating brick. It’s also something I’ve become obsessed with since becoming a homeowner. I randomly came across it on Pinterest one day and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

When we had our house inspection ahead of finalizing purchasing our home, one of the comments our inspector made about the exterior of our house was that the mortar needed to repointing in places and the brick had unfortunately undergone some kind of treatment over the years [he suspected power washing] that removed the veneer or finish from the original brick. Because of this, the brick is a muted colour and was susceptible to damage, and when I later found out about German schmearing, I thought it could be a perfect solution to our strange orange brick.

While the brick is original and is from the Victorian era, it’s pretty basic. Really basic. It isn’t laid in lavish patterns and isn’t fancy. I’m not complaining, but this is another reason why I am partial to giving our house the schmearing treatment. Repointing the mortar as well as dealing with the washed-out orange brick colour might make it look less barfy.

Since then I’ve been obsessed with finding more German schmearing images on Pinterest to further convince myself that this might be a practical solution that would ultimately validate my want to change the strange colour of our house.

But I am hesitant. I would be completely covering the original brickwork. On the other hand, our home is one of very few homes in our neighbourhood that is original brick. All the homes in our neighbourhood are from the same era, but 97% of the houses have been covered in siding over the years. So in my mind, I’m helping to preserve the brick, kind of. By covering it. Kind of.

I’m definitely having a “yeah, but” back-and-forth in my head. I still don’t know what to think, so I’m putting it here for some feedback. And validation. Please validate my ideas. Because I think I could really nail it.

What do you think? Honestly.

Image credits: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6.

Our Victorian pantry – after!

Updating our pantry was not only my first project this year, but the first project I worked on in our new home. It was the perfect small project to get me back in the swing of DIYing; it was a small space, it didn’t take long to complete, looked absolutely atrocious beforehand [which always ensures an excellent after] and cost me around $15 to update.

As a reminder and in case you haven’t seen any decent horror movies recently, this is what our pantry looked like before

… Followed quickly by what it looks like now! I started updating our pantry by first of all, scrubbing it thoroughly. I used warm, soapy water with a bit of vinegar to clean the walls and underside of the stairs. When I removed the shelves, I found mouse droppings on the little shelf ledges – they most likely ended up there when the shelves were wiped over the years. I can confirm that as much as I love mice, we don’t actually have any in our home and the little poops are from some time ago. Still, as soon as I discovered said poop, I resorted to the bottle of Lysol wipes left by the previous owner and wiped the shelves, shelf ledges, stairs, walls and floors thoroughly. Because food.

After a thorough clean, I removed the extra nails, filled the holes and the many gaps of all shapes and sizes. To show that my ‘before’ pictures are not entirely exaggeratedly yellow, above you can see my first round of filler [first round of many in some places], which itself is off-white. Our pantry really was a nondescript shade of children’s nightmares.

I ended up giving the pantry 3 coats of semi-gloss white paint. I decided to keep the original shelves as they were already the perfect size and I figured it would be wasteful to replace them. They already worked perfectly, so it would have been frivolous to replace them. I cleaned them via chemical warfare with Lysol then covered them in my go-to faux marble contact paper by d-c-fix [I’ve used contact paper on a lot of projects. If you’re curious, you can see them all here. From kitchen counters to coffee tables. Also, you can see my tutorial on how to easily apply contact paper here!].

I am so pleased, and dare I say proud, with how my first project in our home turned out. However, I’m not completely finished with this space. I want to update the pantry door as well as get the sweet little pantry light working again [see more about me rescuing it from a life of paint on my Instagram here].