Seeing Red

One of the rooms in our new on-base townhouse that definitely needed some spicing up was our kitchen. It is a long galley-style kitchen with a small eat-in area. The cabinets are honey, the floor is grey, and behind the counter, the “backspalsh” is this grey plastic sheeting (which also happens to cover all our bathroom walls-eek). The combination of grey, white, and honey make the room look very “bleh”. I knew I needed to spice it up a bit, so I busted out my red accents–canisters, tea towels, salt and pepper shakers, and brainstormed on what to do with that backsplash area.

At first I thought I would get some decals, but all the ones that I liked were repeating patterns, and it was going to cost me $200+ to cover the whole area. Then I thought back to the Halloween party we host every year. For the party, I used red tempera paint to write in “blood” on the glass of many of our family portraits. It looks great, and washes right off with a little windex on November 1st.

Tempera paint dries to a matte finish that holds up pretty well, but then easily washes off, so it was the perfect solution. So I ordered some red tempera paint and an inexpensive wall stencil and I took this:

to this!

I love how it turned out! It’s not perfect…ideally you should paint a matte base coat behind the stenciled area first (obviously not an option for me with the glossy plastic sheets). This base coat keeps the paint you stencil on from running. So if you get up close, it’s far from perfect. But overall, I think the effect is great! And I love  it a heck of a lot more than the bleh grey! What do you think?