Walls O' Happy

If there is one thing I really don't like in a room it's a large expanse of white walls and a white ceiling. 

Well, welcome to my new bedroom.

Normally, this is a problem I would fix by throwing a bunch of pictures on the wall, but I'm trying really hard to limit the number of screws I put in my walls (yes not nails, but screws, thanks to my cinderblock? walls), mostly so that it's easier for my mom to spackle when I move out eventually.

In my room at home I created a border made out of the large amount of postcards I've amassed during my travels across the country. It actually looks really cool and I have a postcard for almost every state (and several foreign territories and countries, too). But I don't have a postcard stash large enough to recreate that here. So that was out of the question.

My next thought was to do something like what my friends and I did in our dorms in college, which was to border our walls with quotes. But I couldn't think of a quote I liked enough, and it felt too collegey, so I got over that too.

And then, during my travels through pinterest and evening of crazy DIY fervor, I got hit with an inspiration. What if I lined my ceiling with words? Not quotes, but words.

So I hopped onto Thesaurus.com and started trying to think of a good word to cover my room with. I finally settled on Happy. It seemed like a good thing to expand on. With the help of my favorite word website, I found about 50 synonyms for happy. Who knew that was even possible?

The next task was trying to figure out how to do it. At school, we settled on our font, printed out one of each letter, cut those out, traced them onto pretty scrapbook paper, and then cut those out and taped them to the walls. It was quite the process. But I had found this pretty script font that I really wanted to use and I knew that tracing the letters wouldn't be able to do it justice this time. So, I decided to print the words straight onto the paper (something we would have scorned in school, since we tried to squeeze as many letters as humanly possible onto that 12x12 piece of scrapbook paper). 

After I'd gotten my words sized and figured out, and the paper cut to size (I had to cut the 12x12 scrapbook paper to about 8.5x12 so it would fit in my printer) it was time to print them. That was probably the scariest moment.

Then, I had to cut them out, a process that took about a day. I did the rough cutting with a large pair of scissors, then switched to small sissors to get the larger small details, and finally switched to an exacto knife to do the insides of the letters with holes and other fine details. It's a good thing I enjoy doing tedious tasks!

This is what they looked like all spread out on my bed waiting to get put up on the walls.

I didn't just want to put up a bunch of words, so I had the idea to use something to space them out. Luckily, I've been collecting paint chips for some reason, and Home Depot happened to make some of theirs in a decorative leaf shape, so I decided to use my stock of leaf shaped paint chips (and a bunch of rectangular ones cut to leaf shape) as spacers.

I put each word up on the wall with a ton of double stick tape and used a loop of normal tape for each leaf. I made sure that I never had the same color word (I had five colors with varying patterns) too close to each other and never repeated the same first letter (ie blissful next to blithe was not allowed). I also wanted to avoid getting alphabetical (ie blissful followed by carefree) but didn't always succeed in that goal.

I also decided to alternate the orientation of the leaf shapes, with the two pointed either up or down, because I thought it looked cooler.

In all, the "hanging" process took about five hours, what with tape sticking and color figuring. When I started this process, I was assuming that I would be able to fill the wall I see from my bed, and maybe one other, but certainly not the whole room. So, I was amazed to find that I did the whole room, and had a bunch of words left over... I'm not sure what I'll do with those yet.

I put this up last Friday and a week later I still love it. It makes me smile every time I walk into the room and I sort of can't wait for a "bad day" because I think it will absolutely make things better!

One side note, at least on my walls, double stick tape didn't cut it and after about three days, words definitely started falling off. Fortunately, Scotch's removable poster tape seems to stick much better, so I reinforced each word with that, and so far, so good!