We’re doing a teen bedroom makeover for the One Room Challenge. For week two, we’re painting the walls and ceiling and creating an abstract galaxy painted mural.
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The One Room Challenge
We’re on week two of the One Room Challenge! Check out Week 1 Planning to see what we’re tackling for this six week home decor project. Be sure to check out the rest of the bloggers and designers on the One Room Challenge blog.
Basic painting
Before we started painting, my husband patched all of the holes from where the shelf brackets were. These walls are heavily textured, so it was a bit of a challenge to repair the damage in a discreet way. The plan is for traditional shelves to go on that wall.
The furniture is pretty heavy, so we pushed it all to the center of the room and threw a dropcloth over it. Since this is a six-week challenge, it was important that the bedroom was still accessible at night.
Next, the teen rolled the ceiling with white paint. We went with Glidden latex ceiling paint because it rolls on pink and dries white. This makes it easy to see where you’ve been and how fast it’s drying.
While the ceiling dried, my husband started on the walls. The color is Deep Arctic Night by PPG and I chose a satin finish.
Painting isn’t too exciting, but to summarize, we painted all four walls the same dark blue.
Since we were working on the walls, my husband went ahead and switched out the outlets. We previously updated two of them from their original 1960s outlets, so it didn’t take much to switch out the other two.
Galaxy painted mural
From the beginning of the planning process, the teen wanted to have a galaxy theme and – very importantly – wanted to do a painted mural on one wall.
I lined up a mix of colors based on the photos on our inspiration board. I chose a combination of paints I bought just for this project and some I pulled out of my paint stash from years ago.
- light purple – Perennial Sweetpea by Clark + Kensington
- medium purple – Majesty Violet by PPG
- dark purple – Bradford Blue by Clark + Kensington
- dark blue – National Anthem by Behr
- light blue – Dark Westwind Blue by PPG
- green – Vibrant Meadow by Clark + Kensington
We did some research, but mostly the idea was to just be creative and see what happened. The galaxy mural started out as a bit of a mess of streaks and splatters.
Slowly there started to be a focal point and a bit of a pattern to the chaos. The teen brushed the paint onto the wall with sponge brushes, then spread and blended it by hand.
It took a while to come together, probably around two hours. For the final touch, we flung dots of white paint to make the stars.
The galaxy mural definitely isn’t perfect, but it turned out pretty nice. There are lots of fun details and it truly is a one-of-a-kind piece of art.
Follow along on our teen bedroom makeover!
Week 1: Planning | Week 2: Paint (you’re here) | Week 3: Floors
Week 4: Furniture | Reveal
What’s next? Try these other fun and creative ideas on One Mama’s Daily Drama:
I love what she has done so far! My son wanted all black walls and ceiling in his room when he was her age to showcase his Star Trek collection. I just could not let him do it, it seemed too depressing to me.
I made him do a sky blue. I think he hated it, but covered the walls with Star Trek anyway. This looks really good, so I am glad she is getting to do it. Next paint project, my son can come home and paint a dark color! (Well, maybe on one wall.)
The mural looks great and her stars are perfect.
Thanks! I said we couldn’t do black because if it was too dark it would be hard to paint over later. But I figured we should have fun with it and see how it turns out.
This is so cool!
Thanks, Jessica! I was unsure how the galaxy mural would turn out, but I think it ended up pretty neat.
It is an awesome teen room. Your family is very creative. You should start a family business.
Thank you, Teresa! We had a lot of fun with it and my teen loves how it turned out.