Dining Room Decor - Stenciling Instead Of Wallpaper

The next time you get the urge to hang wallpaper, stop and minute and consider stenciling your space instead. Stenciling your walls is an easy way to add some interest and design to the space without the hassle of hanging wallpaper.

Simple and Affordable

Wallpaper in a room can look fantastic, but it is much more labor intensive than stenciling. You can get a pretty similar effect by stenciling your wall: You can also add custom design combinations to your wall whether you are adding a border or stenciling the entire wall. Stencils allow you to simply add an accent to the wall, or they allow you to cover the wall in pattern. Both ways yield an attractive result, and they are much quicker and easier to do than handing wallpaper.

Buy or Make

When you first start stenciling, it is probably easier to buy your stencils, but as you become a little more experienced you can easily create stencil designs of your own. To make your own stencils you simply draw or trace your design on plastic or acetate and cut it out.
Practice

The first time that you stencil you may want to try a few practice stencils on an old piece of paper or wallboard. Then once you get the hang of how much paint to load on your brush, you can take your newfound skill to the walls. As you experiment, notice which effects you prefer, and then replicate those on your walls.

Stencil Ideas

When you are stenciling a border around the edge of a room, or maybe adding a chair rail accent stencil, you need to lay down a guideline to make sure that you stay straight. You can measure and draw a light line with a pencil, or you can snap a chalk line. Then you have a reference point to position your stencil as you work your way around the room. You will be painting your stencil design and then removing your stencil while the paint is still wet. So be careful not to smudge the design as you remove the stencil. Then just move your stencil to the next spot along your line, and stencil the next segment. If you are doing more than one color in your stencil, you should lay down the stencil for the first color, and then when it is dry, you can go back and stencil in your second color.

One of the great advantages of stenciling over wallpaper is that you can easily paint over it later. With wallpaper, you would have to remove all of the wallpaper and all of the wallpaper glue before you could even think of painting your wall. Stenciling is a very forgiving process as well. If you make a mistake, you can simply paint over it and do it again. By the same token, if you do not like your border when you are done, a simple coat of paint fixes the problem. Stenciling is just easier to update than wallpapers.