The Burning Ring of Fire

A tribute to the great Johnny Cash and my 40th "White Hot" Suprise birthday bash two years ago. 

I painted this quote on our family room wall after watching an incriminating DVD that my brother-n-law made in honor of the night.  Let's just say it involved a thunderstorm, lots of dirty white linens and the guest of honor almost literally falling into a burning ring of fire.  Two years later and a bit older and wiser (I pray), and I thought it was time to retire the phrase.  Both my kids were thrilled to help me with this painting project.  The first step was covering over the lettering with the brown paint.

I have been wanting to lighten and brighten this wall for quite some time now.  Our family room is an impossible room to furnish.  We have a coatrack wall that acts as a mudroom, a pennisula with four barstools on the adjacent wall, two doors, (one closet and one bathroom) two windows and a large sliding door.  It's also very narrow with low ceilings.  I've tried many different configurations and finally settled on one that works, but the back wall was still drab and depressing.  I had purchased a stencil a while ago from Designer Stencils online for a client but we never used it.  I thought this wall might be a good application for it. 

I started by buying the creamy white trim paint that I had used in the family room.  I was going to leave the brown base color and stencil over it with white.  I knew I'd need some spray adhesive to hold the stencil template to the wall while I painted.









Here is the stencil that I bought online for $30.00. I was a little stumped as to why the outside edges weren't cut in the shape of the design but it's so NOT like me to think something through to the end, so away we went.

Here's Kennedy spraying the back of the template with the adhesive. For a temporary hold, you spray it on and let it sit for a couple of minutes.  This worked beautifully to hold the stencil to the wall for at least three paint applications. 

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I rolled the white paint on with a foam rollar. I use these things for just about everything.  This part was easy and fun, but I quickly realized that I shouldn't have removed the stencil until after the paint dried. It would need another coat.  I grabbed a fan to speed up the process.  This might take all day!

And, here's the image that it produced.  Notice the outside edges that remained brown.  I didn't think anything of it yet at this point.

Look closely at the brown in between.  This is where I should have overlapped the template so that no brown paint showed through at all.  I still wasn't convinced that this was a problem.

As you can see, it was starting to look like a pattern.  I wasn't loving the brown shapes but at least it was looking uniform.  Well, my darling husband came home for lunch and asked about the brown.  That confirmed it.  I had applied it incorrectly....but I knew it could be salvaged.  See the picture below to look at how I started overlapping the edge. The top row was done the correct way.

And I continued...keep in mind that each square took about 6 minutes for 2 coats plus time to spray the template every so often.  My patience was running thin.

And here is the mess that it looked like at 5:00 PM. I had been working since 11:30 AM.  I stepped back and freaked!!  Arrrgggghhhh!  It looked horrendous!  Look at the middle of the wall...smack dab in the middle where I started correcting the mistake!  I packed up the ladder, put away the paint and pouted my way through dinner. I seriously thought I'd be repainting the wall the next day.  What a waste of a day.

Kennedy and Brecken to the rescue.  Kennedy kept repeating, "Mom, patience, patience, Mom" like a mantra.  It was just what I needed to regroup.  We eached grabbed an artist's brush and went to work fixing up the thin lines and rebrushing the mistakes. 

I have to say that this was the best part of the project...working together and seeing instant results. Very rewarding and humbling, (that my daughter once again assumed the role of mentor).  I'm so blessed.

You can see that it's certainly not perfect, but all of us love what it did for the room. It's so much brighter in here and because it was a group effort, the girls are so proud of what we accomplished together.  In a perfect world, there would be a modern pear colored sectional in that corner of the wall with really crisp accent pillows but for now I like the change.  Proof once again that a little change ($65 to be exact), goes a long way!