This $15 Trim Hack Is the Best Powder Room Paneling Idea I’ve Seen in Forever

Adding picture frame molding or chair rail trim is a surefire way to inject some character in a room, and Amanda Bowerman’s (@adangerm) DIY chair rail project adds double the personality because it employs a technique I’ve never seen before. 

Amanda added rainbow equestrian-print wallpaper to the upper half of her bathroom walls. For the lower portion of the powder room, she painted the walls black (Sherwin-Williams’ Tricorn Black) and then added black chair rail — but it’s not your average chair rail; it looks zigzagged. 

It’s actually individual 3.5-inch wooden hexagons lined up in a row, also painted in Tricorn Black. These little wooden pieces are often used for crafting and coaster making, but they totally work as trim in this bathroom makeover — and they’d work in any room for that matter. 

The lesson here? Trim doesn’t actually have to be in a straight line, and it can look completely custom for cheap. Amanda’s hexagons cost her about $15. 

Amanda also says because the “trim” pieces were relatively large (3 inches tall), they were forgiving: She didn’t have to create an exactly straight line with her wallpaper or her paint; she just had to make sure the hexes were level across the bathroom. “I had ‘molding’ covering the transition from paper to paint,” she told Apartment Therapy for the previously published Before & After.

I love Amanda’s clever project, and I think it could be fun to try with circle, scallop, diamond shapes, and more. What shape would you try?