Baseball Wall and Boy’s Bedroom Makeover -Part 1

So I had this hair brained idea. One day while sitting in my son’s bedroom I started looking around and notice his room has changed little since he was born. Before his birth, my husband had painted our baby boys room a nice light blue. Being a Red Sox fan he also went out and purchase Red Sox Fathead vinyl wall decals. His baby furniture was  his sisters crib and changing table which was still in great condition. Later the table converted into a dresser and he got a  very basic “big boy” bed. As he grew we added a place for his books, an a few more pieces of décor like a shelf for his little league trophy’s.

He is not a baby anymore

However, as I sat in this baby blue room, I realized his room was mostly filled with items he has had since he was an infant. It was as if a 6-yer-old boys belongings were crammed into a toddlers space.   His Lego’s now take up all of the top surface of his dresser. His Star Wars and Ninja Turtle figures are overflowing out of the too small bins in his closet. The room did not really fit him anymore. His twin bed had no footboard or headboard and the changing table/ dresser was fat for this space.

Here came the mommy guilt when I realized in his 6 years of life his  sister had her room done over twice. (Once was because of a leak which caused us to have to replace her flooring.) How could I have been so unfair? He had never even  asked for his room to be redone like his sister had so it just never happened.

That is where my hair brained idea got its start.  I scoured Pinterest with my son by my side and grilled him on which pictures of boy rooms he liked. After a few days a patterned emerged. Thankfully, he was still drawn to a baseball theme, much to his Dad’s delight, so we could reuse the Red Sox images.

The Baseball Wall

I have never done a room redo on this blog and there is a reason. They are hard! Also, I am no design expert. but in perusing the internet I found my inspiration.  I would create a feature wall painted like the stitches of a baseball! My son was equally as excited by this idea.) It was similar to these here.

Image found on pinterest

Image found on pinterest

I was hoping to enlist my friend who has a whole lot more art talent them me, but we could never seem to get together a time.

After many months of putting it off I decided to get started. I painted 3 of the walls a nice leathery tan. Not wanting it to be too deep, since it is a very small room, I aimed for a color somewhere between infield dirt and a wood baseball bat. The painting went very smoothly for this part. However, after 6 years and a very active boy, the prep-work to repair holes and dings felt like it took ages.

It was up to me… with help from the Internet

Next came the hard part. How was I going to make this baseball wall happen? I mean, I am no artist. Could I really pull this off? I had already told my son I was going todo it. Him was excited so I had to at least try.

In my internet search I found a ton of pictures but surprisingly few tutorials about how to paint a baseball on a  wall. How do you get the shading of a roughed up ball? How to make the stitches even? There were some on how to create a template and paint the stitches. This one from gaining mommymentum   ,tippytoesandtantrums.com  and Simply Mom were the most helpful.

A change in direction

The job would be broken down into 3 parts; sketch out the stitches, faux paint the wall, paint the stitches. Sound pretty easy right? Boy was I wrong. Little did I know how in over my head I was Gaining Mommymentum had a great suggestion of using string and a pencil to sketch out the arch for the stiches in each corner. As I was about to get started I asked my son what he thought. Boy, did that go wrong. He stated he wanted the stiches from top to bottom not corner to corner. Like in this picture from the Creative Imperative, which incidentally became my inspiration picture.

That literally changed the ball game. How was I got to accomplish that? The guy who did these was an artist and painted some amazing rooms.  I tried free handing it and made a huge pencil mess all over the wall which me and my son had to spend 15 minutes erasing. I tried to alter the string technique but the wall was just to big.

Goggle to the rescue. Searching “how to paint a curved line on a wall,” and found this tutorial from thehippiehomestead. I proceeded to measure out where my curve would start at the top of the wall, where the middle point would be, then where the bottom matching point was. Using thumb tack to mark each, I then stretched a piece of string around the points.

sorry about the ladder I had no where to move it

I could not get the long pieces of tape to curve the way he did, so I finally gave up and went with small pieces of tape to hold the string in place. Then traced the curve out in small increments between the tape pieces along the edge of my string. This worked ok since I wanted my line to be pretty thin anyway.

And we’re blending

Once I was happy with the curve and felt pretty good about myself, I started in on the paint.  Having already done a base white coat after prepping and sanding the wall, I thought this part might be decently easy.  At this point my kids really wanted to help. Since I didn’t really know what I was doing I might as well let them have at it. My plan was to mix 1 part brown paint, 1 part white paint and 2 parts glaze to create a light brownish.

The Creative Imperative post states she basically put it on the wall and blended. Granted she has an artists eye and I do not. But this method appealed to me as it required the least amount of tools and seemed easiest, so I went for it. I let my kids do the bottom and I did the top.

What happened to the wall?

We were all swishing and blending away having a great time. After a while I stepped back to observe. Here is were I get nervous. This was not looking like a roughed up baseball. It was looking like a brown disaster. What was I thinking? My kids were having a blast but I kept thinking about how I was going to fix this?

We stopped to take a break and ran back out to Home Depot and get some small roller brushes. The solution, I decided, would be to cover it with a white glaze mixture. Hopefully, that will knockdown the harsh brush strokes and way too dark brown streaks. By this point my husband popped his head in on his way out to work. I could see from the look on his face he was a bit worried about the brown streaky mess I had created on my son’s wall. He said goodbyes and didn’t mention anything about the paint job.(Which was for the best.)

Now to fix this mess

After our second run to Home Depot, a stop for some dinner ingredients and a short time outside playing catch. I got back to painting feeling much better about the prospect. The white glaze mixture worked out perfectly. It totally toned down the wall and mellowed out the streakiness. To my surprise it actually was looking more like a dirty baseball and less like a lunatic ran around with brown paint.  I was so relieve. It was actually starting to look like the inspiration picture!

Now for the stitches

Then came the hardest part of the painting. The part that took a steady hand. (Which I do not have.) Painting the stitches. I tried to use a small form brush as mentioned in one of the tutorials. I guess I was a little nervous and pushed too hard making a big jagged red mark. The line was uneven, wonky and way too thick in several places. A crooked red streak on a white wall. But tippytoesandtantrums.com said she felt the same about her initial line. (Although I doubt hers was anywhere need as bad as mine.)

I  found a smaller brush with a firmer edge and decided it might work better. The second line was much thinner and less jagged. Although, I had to touch up several spots where I had accidentally gotten red in places, all in all the second curve came out much more to my liking. White paint was my friend and I made that first curve disappear and attempted it another time. Even though it was not perfect it was much better then the first time around.

Use what is around

As mentioned in one of the tutorials I created a template to paint on the “v” stitches.  I used a paint swatch card and cut a simple v into it. For a spacer I found a pack of gum my kids had finished off that was the perfect size.

Starting off lightly at first and it was slow going. Got to tell you this was tedious and I kept getting red paint on everything. But then the magic happened and you could see a baseball emerge from a plan wall. This was the cool part. Once all the laces were drawn in, I went back over them to neaten and darken them up a bit. Then I stood back and stared in amazement. There it was a baseball on my son’s wall…and I, the non-artist, had done it.  Pretty awesome!

Then I looked around the rest of his room littered with painters tape, string,  foam brushes, drop cloths, ninja turtle figures and wondered who was going to clean up this mess. Next month I will post part two of my son’s baseball bedroom makeover where I will talk about his furniture and reveal the finished room.