My epic wall... (still in progress)

So I am making excellent progress on my wall. It's taking longer than I thought (I think I have developed some form of ADD. I have no attention span these days).

(Oh, by the way, please ignore the horrible camera phone pictures. I really need to stop being lazy and start using my real camera.)

Here is the before. I gag a little every time I look at it. The number one thing I hate about this room is how brown it is. Brown walls, brown floor, brown fireplace and most of all, that brown trim. I feel like it just pulls your eyes straight to it. And because of that, I feel like it makes the room feel really closed in and much smaller than it actually is. I started pulling down all of the brown trim, and it is such a huge improvement. Even if the walls are still beige. Blech. Anyways.

Anyways, I got the idea for this off of Pinterest. I swear. Hours of productivity lost, and yet it has given me so many creative and inspiring ideas. There are many things I want to try, but this one has been stuck in my head since I first saw it. It is definitely, DEFINITELY time consuming. All in all I think it has taken me about 12 hours (so far). I could have seriously painted the entire living room & hallway in that amount of time, but it is so worth it. I absolutely love the bold color in a very neutral living area and I love the design.

Here is a progress shot...:

I initially had planned on doing the pattern in a high gloss paint of the same color as the walls (Behr's Daring Indigo if you're curious), but once I painted it on I was torn. I loved the texture it gave and the subtleness of it, but I knew this was going to take a while to do and I wanted to showcase it. I wanted people to notice it the second they walked into the room. So after going back and forth for two days, I eventually decided on the gray. It's a much darker gray (even though it looks white in the picture) and it's high gloss instead of the flat in the sample. And I couldn't be more thrilled with that choice. 

Once I settled on a color, I had to start the stenciling process:

And then I was finally able to start painting. It has taken FOREVER, but I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. The big, empty space closest to the brick is unpainted because it hasn't been stenciled yet. I was so tired of stenciling and itching to get painting. But now I have to go back and do it. Ugh. And once I'm done with that I have to cut the stencil in half so I can do the top & bottom of the wall.

I can't wait to have the whole room finished, but I couldn't be happier with my wall. I really do LOVE the bold color, especially when the rest of the room will be pale gray and white when it's done. I kind of want to paint the whole house this color (this shade of blue is my favorite color in the world), but my husband is more a fan of neutral colors. So I think accent walls are nice compromises. (Check out the bright green wall in our gray bedroom!)

The only thing that bugs me (I'm such a perfectionist) is that some of the spacing isn't even. You can barely tell when you look at it as one whole wall and not as individual sections, but I know it isn't perfect and it bugs the crap out of me. But once I'm done painting and I'm not spending large amounts of time six inches from the wall, I'm sure I'll get over it.