This post has actually been one I have wanted to write for two years. The truth is that I love the look, but I will never stencil a whole wall or room again. Ever. Mistakes were made and I hope that anyone attempting this can learn from my experience.
Let’s take a step back to my mindset before I ever began this project:
I blame Pinterest. The inspiration! The creativity! And every project is labeled as “easy”!
Have you seen all of the pictures of those beautifully stenciled walls on Pinterest? I mean there were the pros:
- I have stenciled before in small scale with many, many projects like this wall map, several signs including this Christmas Farmhouse Sign, and an intricate Beer Safe Refrigerator. Clearly, I don’t mind the concept of stencils.
- Wallpaper cost: about $400. Paint: less than $50. I like saving money!
- You can use any color combination you like.
Doesn’t it seem like a no-brainer?!
More like brain dead zombie as I trudged along during the stenciling process. So what happened?
This Dining Room Took 150 hours
Yes, you read that right. This includes the original wall painting, but not the wainscoting. Stenciling was single-handedly one of the most exhausting and tedious projects I have ever done and, truthfully, we have had our fair share of exhausting, tedious, and took-way-longer-than-we-thought projects. This one was especially grueling, however, because of its repetitiveness.
What went wrong?
1. The design area is smaller than it seems.
The stencil that I had was 20×24 inch but required a bit of overlap to lay straight. You can tell that it was designed that way on purpose. Therefore, you actually only do about 17×20 at a time and sometimes less depending on how it lined up.
Worse, you can’t lay a stencil down over fresh paint, so we developed a system where we alternated from one side of the room to the other to stencil. When doing this on a ladder, or in corners, it is much more difficult to move around.
2. Paint Choice
This one is fully my fault, I will concede. Mistakes were harder to notice while wet since I had chosen two colors that were very similar. In fact, when wet, the darker paint was almost identical to the wall paint color.
3. 1 Mistake = 100 Fixes
Truthfully, I am a perfectionist – and it’s not cute or endearing. I’m more in the category of “I can’t sleep without my 10-step bedtime routine” perfectionist. And I wanted crisp, clean lines.
Here’s the thing.
Let’s say that you make 1 mistake per area and some paint gets underneath the stencil or you don’t fully paint into all of the edges. Ok, now multiply that little mistake by the 100+ times I re-positioned the stencil.
While some may not be bothered by a few paint blobs or light areas, I wanted professional looking results. The vast majority of time was spent with me going around with a tiny paintbrush and fixing all of the mistakes and edges.
I might have honestly hand painted or fixed 20% of all of those shapes.Â
4. The Instructions Lied
Corners: the single largest reason I would never do this project again. I have seen several YouTube videos with users lining up their stencils so neatly in the corners. (One of the videos was directly from the company I purchased my stencil).
My stencil might as well have been like folding origami using a friend’s left hand. It was awkward, frustrating, and pretty much impossible. I ended up stenciling as far as I could on each side separately and then hand painting to connect it all.
Because of this, I was so convinced that my stencil was defective that I actually called the company to complain. I wasn’t necessarily looking for a refund or anything. I just wanted confirmation that I didn’t suck this bad as a DIY girl. They offered me a second stencil while assuring me that my stencil was absolutely up to their standards and it was normal not to fold into corners well.
Yeah, no thanks, buddy.
5. Not Using the Right Tools
Again, I can own this one as it being my fault, but high quality stencil brushes are quite expensive for a single use. A roller is of course much faster though and I was assured by the company that as long as I used a dense foam roller and only had a tiny bit of paint on it, everything would look designer perfect. NO way, Jose!
The end result is that the wall is beautiful, but I would never do it again. I mean never.
That isn’t to say that everyone should be scared of stenciling. I still love stencils for smaller projects. I just learned my lesson the hard way with this DIY stenciling project. I actually struggled with giving this post such a negative title. I do understand that some of my experience is user error. I made a lot of mistakes and I learned from them so I hope you can too. For me though, the nightmare is just still too real.
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Stenciling Projects I would do again:
ANGELA OGDEN says
I am fixing to do a stencil in a small guest bedroom above some wainscotting. I chose a more loose design just in case things don’t lineup great. I haven’t done stenciling before but am pretty artsy. I read that using spray tack is a good idea to hold the stencil in place while you work. I have way more time than money so that part doesn’t bother me. I figured I could do a little bit after work each day. Also research paint and was suggested to use a good quality chalk paint as it’s thicker and less likely to bleed under (along with the spray tack). I originally wanted wallpaper but the cost is much higher than my budget will allow. we’ll see how it goes. I ordered the stencil yesterday.
Rachel says
Those are great ideas! I didn’t want to use the spray tack because the walls had been freshly painted and I was worried about pulling the paint back up. I can’t say that it would have happened though. I think I would do this if I tried it again, although I stick to smaller projects now.