Before and After: A $200 Accent Wall Makes This Bedroom Unforgettable
Fixer uppers need a lot of attention—especially over-100-year-old fixer uppers. So no surprise that when Liz Elliot moved into hers, a Sears kit home in historic Charleston, she and her husband focused on making the essential parts of the house livable and didn’t pay a lot of mind to the guest bedroom. “We just threw a bed in this guest room as-is, complete with flat wall paint, and called it a day, with plans to focus on it once we had made bare-necessity changes elsewhere—like renovating bathrooms with hazardous mold and tubs that tilted backwards,” Liz says. “In reality, though, this was the room where we threw clean laundry until we had time to put it away. ” Relatable!
Inspired by the aggressive timeline of the One-Room Challenge, Liz decided to finally take on this blah space. “There’s nothing a like a good, hard deadline to get my butt in gear!” Liz says. (Relatable, part two!) The guest room seemed like an especially good fit since it didn’t need any major renovations.
Liz went all-in on an accent wall with cool hexagon trim work that she planned out and installed herself. “The process was A LOT OF MATH. It took me FOREVER to figure out how to do the hexagon wall,” Liz says. “Eventually, it dawned on me to use grid paper and treat a dot on the grid as a center point on my wall and draw it out. This worked so much better! I then draw a to-scale grid on the wall using a level and a yard stick and then used that to draw out the hexagons.”
Liz used a special cutting tool—like these multi-angle miter shears—to clip half-round wood molding she snagged at Home Depot, no saw necessary. The wall itself cost just $200 including all the tools and materials.
Liz taped the molding in place with painter’s tape, then used a nail gun to secure it. Once she filled in all the holes with wood putty, she painted over the whole wall in a 1960s-style mustard hue (Valspar’s Earthen Sienna).
Above, the couple installed a sleek new fan from Overstock, but Liz wanted some extra lighting, too. “It is a very small room, and only very tiny nightstands would work,” Liz says. “I didn’t want to take up any surface real estate with table lamps on the nightstands, and I didn’t want any wall-mount sconces because it would mess up the symmetry of the hexagon wall and look weird in my opinion.” So Liz’s husband installed new smoky glass pendant lights on either side.
There was a slight hiccup: “When my husband was wiring them something came loose somewhere and one side of our second story lost power for a few days while by husband had to re-wire all of it,” Liz says. “We still don’t know where it came loose, but once he went through and made sure all the connections were good, they worked again. Who knows!”
The rest of the room is outfitted with simple pieces, including mid-century nightstands and a black metal bed from Wayfair, a tufted bench from Target, and a faded vintage-looking rug from BoutiqueRugs. (Not to mention, adorable raccoon art from Target.)
Overall, Liz is thrilled with the end result. “I am SO happy I took the risks with the hexagon trim work and the mustard color!” she says. “I had very little experience with trim work and angles, so I was nervous!” If that’s not proof that there’s value in taking risks, we don’t know what is.
Inspired? Submit your own project here.