Nursery Updates {DIY Stenciled Wall}

Long before I found out we were expecting I had already amassed a serious amount of pins on my "nursery pinboard" in hopes to one day decorate the perfect little baby room. And by serious amount, I'm talking enough to raise suspicion every week or so by my pin-followers. So as soon as we found out we had a bun in the oven I deleted my board and started fresh with new pins for a more realistic vision. One consistent theme I noticed in lots of my new pins was a stenciled wall. For some reason I had just fallen so in love with the idea of {matt} stenciling a wall in our nursery. 

 Finding the perfect stencil took quite some time. After all, I wanted to make sure it would be a design I would love enough to look at for long periods of time while sitting in the nursery. Shortly after narrowing down our favorite stencils to just a few, we found out we were having a girl which helped us further narrow our selection down to the perfect one - Royal Design Studio's Wonderment Trellis Stencil from the Allover Pattern Stencils Collection. And as if it couldn't be more perfect, Royal Design Studio offered the stencil to me to review!! I couldn't have been more excited or honored!

I'm not going to post a full tutorial on how to stencil the wall because the package comes with great instructions and there are a million tutorials on Pinterest as well.    However, I can tell you what not to do. Depending on how you want the design to look on the wall you may need to paint the wall the another color first. I knew I wanted the design to be white so we painted the wall white which was a pain since we had to tape, prime, and paint the wall. It wasn't until we rolled over the stencil in our beige wall color that we realized we had done it all backwards. We never needed to paint the wall white in the first place. What a headache. Two trips to Home Depot later we had enough beige paint to repaint the wall back to it's original color. However, once it dried we realized the color was much darker than the rest of the walls aaaand Matt had decided to also touch up areas on the other 3 walls in this same color. Yikes. So back to Home Depot we went to re-match our paint color to the original walls. After much trial and error, and 3 coats of paint later, we were finally back to square one and were ready to begin the stencil project. So take it from me, save yourself the tears, an argument and an upset hubby, and READ the instructions and carefully assess which color the wall needs to be BEFORE painting! 

After all that we decided to call in our trusted handyman, Hector, to help us with the stencil project. This was really Matt's idea because he didn't want to be the one to blame if it didn't turn out perfect this time. Thankfully, Hector is a perfectionist and knocked the project out in one afternoon. And if you live in Charlotte and want Hector's number for some handy work, email me. He is like family to us and we can't recommend him enough! 

Another tip! Don't be afraid to cut your stencil up once you get to the edges of the wall and floor. At the end of our project our stencil was in a million pieces. These pieces were also helpful for touch ups afterwards. And let me just say, you will definitely spend lots of time touching up areas of the stencil so save your pieces.

The finished product! I am so in LOVE! 

Also, I do not know the paint color of this room. I wish I did because it would have made matching the paint color a lot easier during our trial and error process. We had to take a paint chip from the wall to Home Depot to match, and as previously mentioned, it took a few tries to get it right!

Ah! I am so happy with how it turned out!!

Also, stay tuned for a chance to win your own stencil from Royal Design Studio next week!