The Whimsy House

Like the look of those sleek New York City studios but love your house in the suburbs? Us too. Our décor could best be described as eclectic but it definitely leans toward farmhouse-bohemian fusion with a touch of junk collector. But. Who doesn’t like a brick wall?

You won’t believe how easy this was to create. And even better. It’s such an inexpensive update. This would be great for a teen, tween or kids room and would look great in a darling nursery. Take a look at how you can have one of your own in a day.

We bought brick paneling from our local hardware store and cut it to size so it would cover the wall. The paneling was less than $25 and we only needed four panels. This is one of the times we were glad not to have high ceilings because we had to take a few inches off of the bottom. I held the panel in place and the hubs tacked it into position with a couple of nails in the stud. We used a nail gun, which really helped make it easy, but you don’t have to have one. You can always screw the panels into place or go old school and use nails.  

Once the panels were in place, husband dropped the mic and left me to it. I’ll be honest, I tried several different methods before finally settling on the one that I should have started with. 

First, I thought I might just whitewash and wipe the panels down like I did when painted our fireplace mantel. The fireplace mantle is a lot smaller than a wall and it didn’t give me the texture that I was looking for. Then I thought maybe I would try to paint individual bricks with a less watered down paint but that did do it either. Once I opened up the tub of joint compound and got started, I realized I shouldn’t have tried to shortcut in the first place. 

I scooped out some of the joint compound with a regular-sized scraper and then applied it to the large sheet rock knife. Then, I drug it across the very top left corner of the wall, left to right. From there a did a couple of scrapes down over the area I had just spread left to right. Across-down-down. Across-down-down. And I kept that rhythm over probably a quarter of the wall stepping back frequently to admire and bite my nails. It looked great… but surely it couldn’t be THAT easy… Could it? It was. So easy, a kid could do it. 

Once I was done I went back over it, scraping and moving areas until I felt like the seams were hidden and the patterns were random enough that it looked like a weathered wall. Then I turned a fan on it, cleaned up my mess, washed my hands and went to bed. 

It dried fast. It was completely dry the next morning, but it was a thick spread and I was nervous about it being dry and I hadn’t done any laundry for an entire day so I put off the sealing until later in the afternoon.

My original intention was to buy some sort of sealer and roll it on, but instead I found a couple of cans of polyacrylic in the garage, put on a mask and lightly sprayed the wall. I had plastic drop cloth down on the floor and was super glad I did because it did leave a fine mist about a foot away from the wall. When I sprayed it I didn’t soak it down I just gave it a light coat and kept the back door and front door open to air out the house. In truth, the poly acrylic really doesn’t smell that bad. If you have a sensitivity to sprays, use a liquid poly sealer and roll it on. It’ll be fine.

And there you have it. Here is one more thing you need to know. Every single person that comes in your house is going to touch the wall. And then they are going to tell you how cool it is. And maybe, you can send them this link and they can make one of their own.