Hi and welcome back to the One Room Challenge! I'm a guest participant of Calling it Home's One Room Challenge, and I'm making over my dysfunctional entryway over the course of these five weeks/six blog posts. If you missed last week's introduction and inspiration, please click here. In the meantime, to catch you up, my goal was to transform my dingy, blue, narrow entryway into a light, bright, funky space with ample room for coats and shoes. In short, I'm hoping to turn my entryway frown upside down.

About that frown:

I have no idea what I was thinking with this blue. Other than I was hoping for the best. I did a crappy job painting it, too, and I didn't do anything about the suuuuuuppper dingy yellowish "white" the rest of the walls were painted. This "white:"

I'm seriously so annoyed that my super painted the entire apartment this color. It just sucks. Like, literally, it seems to suck in the light and trap it. There's no excuse for it. (Also, we are apparently very afraid of bears or overzealous yoga moms or something, with all those locks. Also Also, what with the painting over the fixtures???? But I digress). So I painted over the blue, in the process giving the whole hall a coat of a nice, fresh, matte white with just hint of gray.

I mean yes, the first photo is in crappy light, but the difference this fresh white makes is tough to overstate. A matte finish is tricky for keeping off smudges, but in this cramped, lightless space, it really helps not to have a sheen that bounces around the artificial light. I was so enamored of its freshness and brightness, I almost didn't go through with Phase 2 of the plan. Namely, to Otomi the hell out of it. Otomi is a traditional Mexican pattern typically featuring elements of nature, and I'm obsessed. In my mood board, I featured a gray and white wallpaper version, but in real life, I was going to try my hand at stenciling, using an all-over repeating stencil from Cutting Edge Stencils. The stencil runs less than $40, which is less than a 2' x 2' of my inspiration wallpaper. You know how I roll. This One Room Challenge needs to be done on the thrift. Yo. To that end, I also raided our hardware store's "oops" paint section and came up a flat taupe, in addition to the background white color, for my pattern.

The taupe ended up a smidge more taup-y than I thought it might - less gray - but after hemming and hawing, and subjecting my sister to hours of dissection on the subject, I decided I love it. Sometimes, love takes time. In this case, about 24 hours. I started with the wall you see the least - this one.

This wall is only visible from right here in the hallway, and it's a big expanse of wall without too many corners, so it was perfect for practicing. I gathered my materials, including the yogurt bites and high chair pictured above (#nowthat'sgoodparenting), and this stuff:

You need a foam roller, some paint, a tray, a ton of painters' tape, and the stencil. Oh, and a drop cloth. Pictured above are foam brushes for the edges and corners, but I found them to be really disappointing, so I'm trying my had with a craft brush next. Overall, I would rate this project an 8/10 on a paint-in-the-butt scale. I mean, I'm still doing it, so take that number with a grain of salt...okay, okay, I'm already downgrading to a 7. It's just a bit tedious, and figuring out the corners and lining up the edges gets old pretty quick.

This is slightly less fun than it looks. But not to be a whiny whiner: This is totally worth it. I don't have a great after shot for ya, but the wall that faces the family room is almost done, and it looks awesome. I was always most excited about having some pattern peek into the rest of the house from the back hallway, and I think it's really going to be great. Here's a sneak peek:

So, yeah, I'm into it! I've got about one more day of stenciling, but remember that I'm doing things in very small increments that last either the length of a nap or half a bag of yogurt bites, whichever is shorter. I neeeeeed it to be done though, because I need to hang a coat hanger back up. In the meantime, my bed is covered with all our coats. Inexplicably, we each seem to own about seven. Thanks for checking in on our progress and be sure to check out the fun happenings at other guest participants' digital digs!