The Curse of the Dreaded Long Hallway and What I Did About It

Yes, I am one of those lucky people that have a really long boring hallway in my house and couldn’t figure out what to do about it. This week, however, I had enough of it and I decided to try something, not sure if I would like it or not.

We have been living in our house for 3 years now and I have been going through the house painting pretty much everything but I haven’t gotten to the hallway yet even though it is on my list of things to do. I always thought that it would be fun to wallpaper, but it wasn’t in my budget. So I did nothing. It is currently a light beige color which makes it seem even more boring (if that is possible) and so something must be done! Which brings me to what happened this past week.

I was paging through some old magazines and came across this page from a fossil catalog that had my favorite pattern of theirs drawn on the wall (actually on the side wall):
fossil 3

I thought, why can’t I do that?! So I did. At 7 o’clock that night, I got out a gold paint pen that I had lying around the house and my step stool and began to draw on my walls. Can you believe it?! Let me tell you, it was fun! And easy! And fast! Oh the joys of a simple, cheap, fast house project. Here are a few pictures…
hallway 1
hallway 2
hallway upclose

What do you think? Thankfully my husband is familiar with my crazy ways and didn’t even bat an eye that I was drawing on our walls with a gold marker. He just said, “good job, I like it.” What a great guy! But if you decide to tackle a project like this and your husband isn’t as easy going as mine, you may want to warn him first so he doesn’t have a heart attack when he sees you drawing on the walls! Or, if you have kids, do it when they aren’t around so they don’t think it’s okay to color on the walls with their magic markers (like my husband did one time at his aunt’s new house when he was a little guy).

For those who are interested in knowing, it took about 2 fat paint pens and 2-3 hours. I didn’t measure anything, I just started drawing. It’s not perfect and I like it that way. Here are a couple more images also from fossil of other patterns you could try:
fossil 2 fossil 1
If you have a boring wall or hallway, go give it a shot! Just tell yourself that you can always paint over it if you don’t like it!