No seriously; this was a lot of work. Months before, we set the intention to paint the nursery something mid-century modern that wouldn’t be out of place in this house. Then, we dug through nursery & kids room idea books at the hardware stores.
The only thing that caught our eye was a diamond pattern, but they were wallpaper. I don’t know if you’ve had any experience with wall paper, but let’s say I’m not a fan. So we settled on paint.
But what colors?
The previous owners of our house left us the paint cans of everything they used. It was only a year ago, so Lowe’s still had the same paint! The nursery wall color was the lightest in a brown series. So we went with the next shade darker. It didn’t seem like much in the store, but as you can see there’s plenty of contrast.
I did a scale drawing in Illustrator to see about how big the diamonds would be without making us crazy. We thought about adding a random colored diamond every so often, but it wound up being too busy when you add other items in the room. You know, like furniture.
What sizes?
Too small, and we’d never get it done. Too large, and it looks lazy. Of all crystalline structures equilateral triangles are my favorite. The classic diamond shape is composed of two equilateral triangles, one pointing up, one pointing down, base sides touching. For convenience of measuring, I chose a triangle with an edge length of 12 inches.
How the Heck to You Do This???
I used pencil to mark off the tips of diamonds a few inches down the wall from the ceiling, twelve inches apart. Then I made a course or marks around the baseboard directly below the other ones, twelve inches apart. After these placement decisions were made, I chalked lines at a thirty-degree angle from the ceiling points to the floor points. Finally, the direction reversed, and I went around the room to complete the diamond grid.
We’re down two full weekends at this point.
The third and final weekend we painted. We cut a couple 60º angles and a couple 120º angles out of stencil plastic for the corners. We connected them by brushing against straight edge; and then we rolled the centers. It worked very well. Thirty-three hours later… here’s the result:
