A note from the Author
Hello there and thank you for joining me today. My name is Sidrah Hammad and I go by the instagram handle The Poor Sophisticate. Why? Because I love the finer things in life but don’t enjoy spending a fortune on them. Hence, the poor sophisticate was born. A mum of two girls, I love organizing every inch of my home and coming up with fun DIY projects to set it up. Colours make me happy and I keep trying new ways to introduce them to my home.
Connect with Sidrah
You can find me on Facebook at The Poor Sophisticate and on Instagram as @thepoorsophisticate.
Today I am going to be sharing a recent project that I did to refresh my dining area. I have a little dining nook which is attached to my formal lounge. Since all the attention always went to set-up the lounge, the dining area looked quite bland.
Painting an Accent Wall
To give this space some drama I decided to give it a makeover. The first thing I did was to choose a paint colour that complemented the lounge as well. I chose the shade “Bright Cerulean” by Taubman Paints as the colour for my accent wall. I used the following products to start my paint mission:
- Painters Tape (To tape of the edges)
- Angled Brush (To cut corners)
- Paint Roller (To paint the wall)
- Half Litre can of Paint
- An old plastic table cover (To use as a Drop Cloth)
Once I had all my supplies ready, I was good to go. I taped off the edges of the wall with my painter’s tape and used the angled brush to “cut the corners”. In layman terms, that means just painting the edges. Then I used my paint roller and started painting the rest of the wall. It took me 3 coats to get an even finish and I was finally happy with the result.
DIY Book Wall
Next comes the part where I decided it couldn’t be classified as an accent wall with just a different colour. It was too mainstream for me. So, after browsing through pinterest for a while, I decided I wanted a Book Wall!
For this I needed the following supplies:
- Old books
- A pack of nails
- A hammer
- Some pages ripped off from the same books.
- Glue Gun
The first thing I did was to make a basic pattern on the floor of where I wanted the books to go. This gave me a basic idea of how to position them.
I then nailed the books to the wall with a hammer and left a couple of pages so I could cover the nails with them. It may look and sound hard, but it was a pretty straight forward process. I nailed the books at different angles to give it a good visual appeal and then folded some of the pages to give them a sort of “half-read” look and used a glue gun to stick them in place.
Then to fill up the space in between, I played around with some loose pages and used the same Painter’s tape rolled over to stick them. That gave the wall a “fuller” look. Also, makes it looks like the wind has blown away some of the pages.
I have left it as it is for now, but I can always tuck in some twigs and twines in the books for some seasonal décor.
And that is it, I now have a pretty phenomenal dining area with a personality of its own. It now stands out and commands attention. All this for less than $50.
The biggest expense in this project for me was of the paint. I got the books from the library for a $1 for a bag of books.
And that’s about it from me. Thank you for going through this DIY with me. Hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I loved doing it.
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