DIY Accent Wall Modern Cheap Easy Removable

All right, welcome back. Today's project that we're looking at is this accent wall. If you or your wife like Pinterest as much as mine does, this might be something that you might be getting into. I'm here to say it was pretty easy, didn't take a whole lot of time, and I think I even found a way to make this removable. So if this isn't the cool thing or the fad here in the next five years or something, we could possibly take this down and it not be a nightmare. So let's get into it and let me show you what I did. All right, so the first step of the project is to paint the wall. And I'm no professional painter, but the one thing that I have realized is it works a whole lot better when you test the colors of paint on the wall. It allows you to get a true feel of what that color is going to look like on your wall. A little swatch doesn't give you much. So really, the only interesting thing about me painting this wall is that we did it about a week ahead of time before we ended up messing around with the trim or doing anything special. I alluded to that I wanted to try to make this removable, and what I'm trying to do is let that paint cure on the wall for at least seven days, try to get really, really dry before we start putting the trim on it. Because if you try to put the trim on something that hasn't, the paint that hasn't fully cured, the trim is going to stick to the paint. And if you ever try to remove this, you're going to be removing layers of paint. I might end up removing layers of paint anyway, but at least I can say I tried. Now, while the paint was drying, we had a ton of time to plan out and try different designs. And you can see that I'm in a CAD program, which gave me kind of an advantage of copying and pasting and making different designs pretty fast, but CAD's not necessary. As long as you have some kind of visual, a sketch of what you want to do, so that you know the rough materials that you're going to need to buy and the angles that you're looking at, it'll work just fine. As you can see, we decided on a chevron pattern, four different panels, and then the boards that we're using are going to be at a 30 degree angle. The one advantage that I do have using CAD is I have specific dimensions. So I can tell exactly on the wall, theoretically, where these boards are going to go. And it helped me be a little bit more accurate. The trim that we use for this project, we found at Lowe's, and it's a two and a half inch wide primed MDF trim with beveled corners. Some people use pine, some people use trim that's a little bit more narrow. We decided to go this route because we like the width. The MDF we use because it's nice and smooth, so you won't get any wood grain. And then also it's a little bit more flexible. We know our walls are not exactly 100% straight, so this should contour to the wall a little bit better. Then I went outside in the garage and using a mini roller and a little like cabinet style foam roller, we went ahead and pre-painted all 17 of these. Next I removed the baseboard and then I marked out all the locations for the studs using the stud finder. I marked them with a piece of painter's tape and that'll come in really handy later on in the project. But I did find out I didn't need to remove the baseboard. I really thought that I was going to use a five and a quarter piece of trim, a flush piece of baseboard trim, and then put my first horizontal piece right on top of that so that they would be flush. I really thought that was going to look good, but when I tested it out, I really didn't like the fit. I actually like the contoured shape of our original baseboard. So I went back with that and put the other piece of baseboard back on and just nailed it back in. Following weekend, I finally started cutting trim. When installing it, I started off with the perimeter and I'm just nailing these into the drywall. I'm using a one and a half inch 18 gauge nail, just long enough to get through the three quarter inch trim and into the half inch five eighths inch drywall. No need to go any deeper. Next, I installed the vertical pieces of the trim. I made sure that I measured out to the center of the room, put in the center one exactly in the middle of the room and made sure that it was plumb with a four foot level. Then I went back, measured out the center point in either section on either side, installed those two pieces. Yet again, making sure that they were plumb and exactly centered in between the two other pieces. Installing the angles is where CAD came in handy. You can see that I'm measuring up that certain distance and marking it on the trim. Then I'm holding the angled piece of trim already pre-cut to a 30 degree angle. I'm marking it on the top and the bottom where it intersects the vertical piece. And that let's me know exactly where I need to cut that 30 degree angle. And then I nailed it in just like the rest. And you can see that that 30 degree angle when measured out, it came perfectly to my mark. As good as CAD is, it didn't keep me from putting the trim piece on the wrong side of the mark. So you can see I messed up here and the spacing isn't perfect, but this kind of proves my point how this is removable. So you can see I just yanked this board off and it came out fairly easy. The only thing that it left was three nail holes. You can see because the boards were pre-painted and they weren't stuck in yet anyway, you can see that it didn't pull any of the paint off and I'll just have to fix those holes. I continued with the next panel going in the same angle so that I didn't have to adjust the miter saw. One thing that I'd like to note is I do mark every single piece so that it goes in the back in the exact same location that I measured it from. When I started the opposite angle, I used the speed square just to mark it over horizontally so that I knew that angle was going to intersect in the same place so that it didn't visually look off. I just continued the same process of nailing these in. Now that all the trim boards are on the wall, the location of the studs comes in handy. I transferred that measurement up to each one of the trim boards so that I could nail each one of these into the studs. To do this, I switched over to a 2.5 16 gauge nail. The next step was to cover up all the nail holes and areas where the joints come together. I used this Drydex pink spackling. Before I put it on, I used a nail punch or a nail set to pound in all the nails that weren't below the surface of the trim. Then I started putting on the spackling. For me, this is where things went wrong. Looking at this, this is terrible. I'm putting on way too much. I would have went way better off if I would have just dabbed it on with my finger just enough to fill the hole or to fill the gap. It didn't end up hurting me. It just gave me a whole lot more work in the next step when I had to sand all this stuff off. These are the sanding pads that I used to actually sand down the wall. You wouldn't have to buy a fancy pad or something different like this. If you had a block of wood, you could wrap a piece of sandpaper around it and it would do the same thing. The nice thing about these is they were flexible and they had little channels to get the dust away from the wall. Also, you had the ones with corners on them where you could actually get into the corners and sand in the specific corners. In the last step, I put on way too much spackling. That just made this step take a little bit longer. I went through and sanded them. For me, the ones that ended up looking like this where there really wasn't much spackling over the nail hole ended up painting the best, but I'm no pro. Then the last thing that I had to do was remove all the dust. I just got a vacuum, vacuumed it out, and then I ended up taking an air hose and spraying the entire thing down. The last step of this project is just to put a second coat of paint over the trim. To do this, I'm using a mini roller that was designed for cabinets, trim, and doors. It just has a low nap and leaves a really smooth coating. For this, we're only painting the front face of the trim, not any of the edges or the wall. I ended up doing this twice, so I put two more coats of paint on it. At the end, it looked really good. At this point, we're getting the room put back together, and I'm pretty impressed with the way that it looks. This wasn't probably my first pick of a project to do. It was the wife's idea, but I will say that it came out really well, and I'm glad that we did it. I was thinking about just trying to convince her to paint the wall a different color and make it an accent wall, but really adding the molding to the wall gives it that 3D effect and makes it look really cool, and I really like it. The other great thing about this is it was pretty cheap and pretty easy. This was probably right around $200 when you factor in the cost of the molding, a gallon of paint, and some paintbrushes, and some other little things. It only took really three days of working on it to get done when you spread that across two weekends to let that paint dry in between, and then there were really no specialty tools that were involved. If you have a miter saw or something that you can cut angles with precisely, and you have an air nailer, you're pretty much good to go. So overall, I'm really happy with the way that this turned out, minus a mistake or two. And then the other great thing I guess I should add is that I think I found a way to make this removable. You saw when I made the mistake of where I put the wrong board, that board popped right off. I think I added a little bit of strength to it when I went back and put the nails in the studs. So these things, you can't pull them off as easy now, but in the future, because the layer of paint that's on the wall is separate from the layer of paint that is on the trim molding, I really do think that this is going to be removable. Yeah, you might have to sand the wall a little bit, and you're definitely going to need to put another coat of paint on it, but I don't think it absolutely ruins this wall, where when you're pulling this off, you're tearing off layers of the drywall, the paper layer, the drywall, and you have real damage back there. So overall, I'm pretty happy with the project. If you liked watching the video, please give it a thumbs up. That definitely helps. If you like this project, or you take a look at some of my other stuff on my channel, and you like what's going on, I definitely have tons of ideas of stuff I need to get to, or that I want to get to. I encourage you guys to subscribe. But as always, I hope to see you in another video.