nannygoat: striped wall

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

balancing a big room and filling an empty wall

In our new house we have a great big family room downstairs that we LOVE!

On one side of the room we have this...

We needed an entertainment center with A LOT of storage for all our books, games, and yes VHS movies (I know, I know, I'm a little behind on the technology front).

As much as I would love a huge wall of built-ins or a ginormous Potter Barn entertainment center these 5 bookshelves from Target have been a great solution for a really reasonable price.

See the old window frame on top? My sweet friend recovered it from her home renovation.

It was one of the original windows in her 130+ year old house

and it is one of my favorite things in my house. Thanks again Tiff!

On the opposite side of the room we had a few chairs and a huge blank wall so the room looked very heavy on one side and bare on the other.

Sorry, no pictures of the huge, blank, beige wall.

Just use your imagination. ;0

I knew I wanted to use the wall to display our family photos and I framed each 8x10 in a beefy matted frame like so...

But it wasn't enough.

So, I added these "buttons" and some ribbon above the frames ...

and then some vinyl lettering below the group of pictures like so...

The wall is 9ft high and 16ft wide and by the time I finished the display of family photos with the lettering it measured 9ft wide by 3ft high and made a huge difference.

But it still felt out of balance with the other side of the room and since I wanted to keep things very clean and open feeling I decided against adding more furniture/ accessories to the wall and instead picked up my paint brush.

I taped off the wall for 18 inch stripes (making sure I didn't need to paint where I had the vinyl lettering) and took the original beige paint and added white (just like with my painted wallpaper) to create a bit of a contrast without making it too "bold".

I wanted it to visually draw your eye but not smack you in the face.