Matte/Gloss stencil in the Tiny Powder Room

I HAD to tweak the walls of the Tiny Powder Room. They were driving me crazy. There's a *really* subtle difference between the wall above the chair rail and the wall below. Can you see it here?

How about in this shot. The wall above the chair rail has the light hitting it a little better here.

Yep, it's white on white, but it's not wallpaper anymore.

But before I go back to the result, I'll start at the beginning. I posted about the facelift of the Tiny Powder Room two years ago; it was the first room we tackled with anything other than paint after we moved in. In here, we originally overhauled the paint, tile, fixtures, and added wallpaper. Everything is still wonderful in the Tiny Powder Room, except the wallpaper. It's gone.

At the time, I chose a white-on-white wallpaper that was shimmery white in the background with matte white leaves over the top. It really caught my eye and added some visual interest to a tiny wall space. I had vowed to never do wallpaper again, but I didn't know how to get that shimmery texture with paint, and so I took the plunge and wallpapered. Here's how the wallpaper looked when it was fresh:

shimmery white on white wallpaper we originally used

Of course today, two years later, there's Pinterest, where I recently discovered how to do tone-on-tone shimmer walls with paint. Anyway, back to the wallpaper--over the past two years, it has become evident that I didn't hang this wallpaper very well. The seams were gapping and becoming really distracting.

ugly wallpaper seam that detracted from the pretty wallpaper

More ugliness.

So I decided to take down the wallpaper. My mission: to recreate that wallpaper's shimmery patterned leaf effect with the matte/gloss stencil method I'd seen on Pinterest.

For me, paint is always easier, faster, and cheaper than hanging wallpaper. And since my Tiny Powder Room is not much bigger than a postage stamp, I knew I could get this done in just a day or two. It was a no-brainer.

Here are some inspirations from by blog-surfing:

This wall by Jesse at Good Girl Gone Glad is so pretty.

And this one by Centsational Girl is pure class.

Looking at these beautiful examples, I was almost ready to go with a trellis pattern like theirs. But in the end I decided to go with an all-over leafy pattern instead, trying to keep with the look of the wallpaper I loved so much.

The stencil I found at A.C. Moore. Yay for their 15% teacher discount!

To begin of course, I had to remove the wallpaper, and I was worried that this would be the most difficult and tedious part of the project. But it was a surprisingly easy task! Much of it just pulled right off. I sponged a bit of water on the backing layer and it easily scraped or pulled off the wall. I had it done and cleaned up in less than an hour.

I'm sure the easy removal is at least partially due to my poor installation two years ago! Anyway, after I cleaned it up with TSP, Tom patched the walls and ceiling for me, and even did the sanding work for me too. What a guy!

All finished with prepping--on to the ceiling paint, and I decided on blue this time.

After all, there's already plenty of white in here and I had a bunch of blue paint already--I had mixed it up myself from some old partially full blue and white cans of paint. I used it to paint this dresser in my basement...

...and I still have 2 quarts left over. So you can imagine I'm on the lookout for other things to transform to pale glossy blue.

For the walls, I bought two quarts of paint at Lowe's (I only needed a quart of the base paint because the wall space I needed to cover is so small. If this were a full sized room, I'd have needed to buy a gallon of base paint), one quart matte, and one semi-gloss.

I decided to go with matte for the background, and stencil glossy leaves on top. After I painted the walls with the matte (Bistro White) and let it dry, I used a small foam roller to roll on the gloss (Polar White) over the stencil. The stencil was about 24"x24", and I taped it up wherever it would fit completely on the walls.

After I had done that and let it dry, I cut up the stencil to make smaller sections that I could fill in on gaps, edges, and corners. I basically slapped these on the wall wherever I wanted more glossy leaves. For these smaller areas, I didn't use the foam roller; instead I used a little foam brush.

I didn't worry about lining up the stencil at all and I let the stencil overlap earlier stencilings, which made this a very easy stencil to apply. I wanted it to be just a flowing, glossy leafy pattern. In the end, I had a tiny little piece of stencil that I taped down and tap-tapped to put some leaves on any sparse spots.

After the leaves were finished, the walls looked like this. It's hard to take a picture of the entire wall because the room is so darn tiny!

The biggest chunk of time for this project was the hour or so for the paint to dry between stencilings. Even with that, and touch-ups and clean-ups, I got it all finished within 24 hours. If I did this again, I think I'd look for some stencil paint that was pearlized, and mix that with the white semi-gloss wall paint for stenciling. Because although these leaves shimmer when the light hits them, I'd kinda like them to shimmer even without the light hitting them.

Here's the final result:

With lights on:

and lights off:

There's a very subtle contrast when the light doesn't reflect. I think the blue ceiling is playing with the matte background and giving it a subtle blue tinge, which I love. You can see just barely see it next to the mirror:

Here's how the matte/gloss stencil compares to the wallpaper (except for the difference in light exposure):

Here are a few shots of the wall and blue ceiling reflected in the mirror. When the room is only 40" x 60", you have to get creative with your photos! Like, bumping your backside against the wall and sliding down and aiming up.  

I love how this turned out. And the fun thing is: If I want more leaves, I can just whip out that stencil and add 'em! And you know I just might do that! Happy continuing summer everyone!

ps I decided to link to Thrifty Decor Chick's "Show Us Your Bathrooms" just for fun. And because I'm off for the summer, so why not? :) There are lots of lovely bathroom posts over there to feed your bathroom decorating imagination.