Before and After: A $5 Afternoon Project Makes a Plain White Bedroom Feel Cozy

White walls can look fabulous—but sometimes they can make a space look a little unfinished. When Laura Skellet (@imlauraashley) moved into her bedroom in her Swedish home, it was covered in gray floral wallpaper. It was too dark, she says, and not to her taste.” During the winter months in Sweden, it can be dark for 18 hours a day. I wanted to have a space that was a little brighter,” Laura says. “My mom and my sister flew over from Canada last spring, and helped me paint it white. But it still felt incomplete.”

When Laura look at her saved photos on Instagram, she found that many of them were wallpapered rooms. “Clearly this was something I was drawn to,” she says, “but I was nervous to commit to something financially and visually.”

“My goal was to create a cozy bedroom with a unique style,” Laura says. “I posted in the Apartment Therapy Facebook group shortly after the group debuted, looking for inspiration to make the room feel complete. I brought up the idea of DIY wallpaper, and a fellow user gave the suggestion to try it on paper first. This gave me the confidence in my design and to start the daunting project.”

With just $5 worth of black paint, Laura created her own light gray by mixing in the leftover white from her first paint job.

“Upon recommendation, I made a couple sample designs and hung them up on the wall. This allowed me to test brushstrokes and width,” Laura says. On the day of the project, she started in the top corner of the room, working in a small one-meter-square section at a time. “I started with painting and spacing out the largest lines, then I would fill in between with smaller lines,” Laura says. “I would then get off the ladder, assess if everything was even, or if there was somewhere that needed to be filled in. I would then move down the wall onto the next section. There are some areas to me that seem tighter than others. But I think the design was supposed to be a little imperfect—the lines do not have to be evenly spaced or perfectly straight.”

The paint project took one afternoon of work, which Laura got through with the help of a few episodes of a podcast. By bedtime, she says, the paint had dried enough that she was able to put her furniture back where it belonged.

“The hardest part was finding the motivation to continue after the first few brushstrokes,” Laura says. “I couldn’t help but have self-doubt, wondering if I would have to paint it over with white.” But in the end, she loves the combination of bold pattern with subtle color—and thinks it makes the bedroom feel so much more welcoming and cozy.

As for Laura’s advice? “Embrace imperfections when painting.”

Inspired? Submit your own redo here.