“You Are Not Martha Stewart” or “How We Painted a Chevron Wall on a Sunday Afternoon.”

Let me preface this post by saying I’m not the craftiest individual.  There’s a reason my arts & crafts board on Pinterest is called “You Are Not Martha Stewart.”  My mom is a wonderful crafter and seamstress and has made me countless dresses, outfits and amazingly my Quinceañera dress based on a drawing on a napkin and my prom dress in a matter of days.  Yet somehow her talents in cutting straight lines, embellishing things with rhinestones and just being a great crafter didn’t get passed down to me.

I decided now that Chris and I have our own apartment it was time to upgrade the plain old decor with some new touches, we’re planning to be here until we buy a house so we might as well make it feel like home!

I checked out this tutorial on painting a chevron wall from Radical Possibility.

So off we went to Home Depot to load up on paint and supplies.  We decided on a light grey color from the Martha Stewart collection because she was my guiding spirit animal in this project.

We started out by drawing a grid on our wall.  Thanks to Chris’s ability to measure things and draw straight lines (thank God he’s a graphic designer) this was an easy task.  We marked off the lines and used a Strait Line chalk device (this blew my mind).

What a boring old wall huh?

The next thing we did was attempt to tape off the chevron pattern on the wall.  In retrospect, we should’ve penciled in the diagonals to make it easier like Radical Possibility did.  Instead we suffered trying to calculate the pattern and not seeing it really come to fruition.  Of course frequent snack breaks helped us keep from going insane.

I didn’t take any pictures of the taping process because it was really a horrifying experience.  You see that section with tape pieces?  We decided to idiot proof it so we wouldn’t accidentally paint the wrong section.

And then the painting began.

We let the paint dry for about 45 minutes or so before peeling it off. And taaaadaaaaa!  Chevrons!

We actually pulled this thing off!

We used a pretty big wall in our apartment so I’m really glad we were able to create the pattern.  Also we can never move out because it looks way too awesome.  And thus we finished our first home improvement project together.