Geometric Painted Wall Treatment | Kate's Studio Makeover

It will come as no surprise that I love to help friends with their decorative challenges. So when Kate asked if I wanted to help decorate her studio apartment, I jumped at the chance.  She already had a great space with gorgeous light and lots of potential. She just needed a few suggestions to get her pad as fabulous as she is!




Her apartment is an alcove studio with 440 feet of space so layout was super important. I loved the white walls but knew it needed something on the far wall to add some visual interest without taking up any precious floor space.  Since it was a rental we ruled out wallpaper or molding treatments which left us with the great equalizer: paint. After batting around several different options, Kate decided a geometric stripe felt most like what she had in mind.






After we had settled on the pattern, we got down to the hard part: color selection. We tried lots of samples before selecting Valspar's Northern Juniper (a blueish green with just a tad of grey thrown in) and Blindfold (and almost but not quite black grey).  Lowe's Love Your Paint Guarantee makes this process a little less stressful - if we didn't love the paint for any reason, we could return it for a full refund.  Gotta love that kind of safety net.








Now it was time to get to work. I headed over to Lowe's (I knew they would have everything we needed for the whole project in one trip) to pick up the following supplies:

• Valspar Signature Flat Latex Paint in Northern Juniper and Blindfold
• Bosch Red Beam Self Leveling Laser Level
• Frog Tape
• Whizz Cabinet Foam Mini Paint Rollers
• Disposable Paint Trays
• "One Tuff" Dropcloths

Once I had all my supplies I headed over to Kate's apartment and steeled myself for a long day. I knew this was going to take a lot of prep.  Kate and I got to work early in the morning and we spent the entire day on this.  It's definitely a 2 person job and you will be sore when you are done but it was so worth it.






I had drawn out a rough sketch of a plan to start and then using the laser level and the frog tape, we painstakingly taped out stripe after stripe.  Carefully marking the areas we didn't wan't to paint over with more frog tape (one slip up there and we would have ruined the whole look!).  Once we were happy with the stripes, it was time to get to painting.


I knew this was going to be a lot easier if we got that tape off while the paint was still wet so we did a bit of a mad dash to get it all on there as fast as possible.  Two coats per stripe worked well for great solid coverage.  It was time for a little prayer to the paint gods before pulling off the tape and seeing the end result.





Ta-da!  It turned out just as I had hoped (without only a few oops on my part that were easily touched up with a paintbrush).





The result was the perfect bold, mod inspired pattern we were going for.  Setting a backdrop for the whole apartment layout that I'll share with you in my next post.  Stay tuned for finished photos of the whole apartment.









Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Lowe's but all opinions expressed are my own.