Painting a Geometric Wall for the Ultimate Kids Gaming Room

One year after moving into our new home it was time to fix the dingy walls in our children’s rooms.  The previous homeowners loved EVERYTHING brown and mustard.  It was time to brighten up the kiddos’ rooms and we decided if we were going to paint, we were going to do a complete makeover.  We’ll start here with the boy’s room first, because my daughter’s room became an ordeal.

Both kids wanted a cool accent wall.  Our son immediately fell in love with the geometric accent walls found on Pinterest. He is really into Fortnite at the moment so my wife chose some colors from the game that she thought would look good and that would also still look good in his room after his interest shifts away from the game.  

The colors needed to look good together and to also look good with whatever color we chose as a base coat.  You can absolutely choose a unique base color for the geometric wall, but we wanted it to be the same color as the rest of his walls.  There were two reasons for this: 

1. We hoped it would help tie the room together (It DID!) 
2. It saved us from buying another can of paint. (ICYDK, paint is expensive.)

The color my wife picked was a light, bright blue. This was our first time trying Valspar Signature Series and it impressed! One coat was all it took to cover up the depressing mustard walls with this vibrant blue!

We used the same base color in both bedrooms, so as we finished painting the second bedroom, the first bedroom was dry enough for use to paint the trim.  The previous home owners had used a shiny, faux-wood paint scheme on the trim all across the entire house and it has been difficult to cover up in the past.  When we first painted our living room, it took approximately seven coats of cheap paint to make the trim white.  We hoped a slightly more expensive paint would cut down on our workload this time.  We chose Sherwin-Williams semi-gloss white.  This time, it only took about two coats to cover the trim - definitely worth the investment.  

With the base coat and the walls done, it was time to face what we thought would be the hard part - making the geometric pattern for the accent wall.  Surprisingly, the process was really simple.  We began in one top corner taping off random designs, making sure to alternate between large and small shapes.  The are only a few issues to caution yourself with:

1. Tape off your trim and other walls first.  We did not do this the first time and it made the process of removing the tape pattern take longer.   
2. Make sure the tape is straight.  The longer the span of a single strip of tape, the more likely you are to add curvature to it.  We kept a level on hand to check our progress.  
3. Make sure the tape is tight to the wall.  After applying a strip of tape we always used our hands to go back over the edges of the tape to ensure we would not have bleed-through.
4. Near the trim and the other walls, make sure to have medium to large shapes.  Really small shapes on the edges are more difficult to paint, especially if you are using a roller. 
5. Mark off your colors first to make sure you don’t end up with one color dominating a single area.  We tore off small squares of blue painters tape and put those in each shape. We then wrote the color for each shape on the squares. The tape was a good choice because it was easily removable if we wanted to change the color and when we started to paint.  

Other than that, the process was simple and only took a short amount of time.  Once we taped everything and labeled all of the shapes, the only thing left to do was to paint.  This went faster than expected.  We would paint one color at a time using a small roller for most of the job and a small paint brush in spots where the roller proved too large.  Starting from one side of the wall and moving to the other meant that the first coat of paint was usually dry enough that we could immediately begin the second color.  We had chosen to use three different colors and were able to leave our rollers and brushes out for all three because it was such a fast job.  For these three colors we again chose Valspar Signature Series.  Each color only required two coats of paints.  The only “mistake” we made was the lime green color we chose looks slightly more yellow next to all of the blues and purples.  We still like the look, however, so we are not worried about it.  

After we placed the last coat of paint, it was time to peel the tape off and reveal whether this project was a success or a failure.  We were definitely worried because some of the tape had kind of bubbled up and we were afraid it would cause bleed-through.  To our pleasant surprise the tape peeled away easily and the lines were extremely crisp.  There were only a few stray spots of bleed-through where we probably just didn’t smooth out the tape good enough.  This was our first time using Frog Tape and were were extremely pleased to find a product that lived up to its billing.  

Our son loves the wall.  Originally we were going to place a poster in the middle of the wall, but seeing the final result we decided that the wall will be left alone.  In our next post we will discuss how we decorated the room and tried to balance the decor on the other walls.  After that, we will discuss the multiple challenges we faced in painting and decorating our daughter’s room.

 - Until then, all the best.