Home Office Accent Wall

Our home office was a snooze of a room so we decided to spruce it up with a wood trim accent wall. Let me introduce you to the project that took too long. I can’t exactly tell you why or which step took the longest but we spent far too much time on this wall.

Step 1: Paint
When you’re choosing paint they say to stick to the colors on the swatch so that they all “go together”. What do I mean by that? Well if you look at the above photo those three colors should be represented in a room/home. For example: the lightest of the three could be trim, the middle a wall color, and the top an accent wall color.

We chose Cityscape by Sherwin Williams to paint the accent wall. The rest of our walls are Colonnade Gray. Put your colors inside your light switch (there’s typically only one light switch in a room) so that you can remember!

Step 2: Frame the Wall
Step 2 brings in the wood working! Since we kept our baseboards and crown molding we added a quarter round on top of the baseboard and under the ground molding. With the quarter round in place there was a smoother transition when we added the 1 x 2 frame all the way around the wall. We used an air nailer to secure the 2 quarter round strips of wood and the four 1 x 2 boards around the wall.

Step 3: Add Wood Trim Pattern
We divided the wall into 6 equal sections, you’ll want an even number. Then taped off a diagonal chevron/herringbone pattern so that we could decide how many diagonal stripes would look best.

Using some 7th grade math skills with the pythagorean theorem and a tape measure we determined how long to cut the middle diagonal boards and what angles worked best. What’s the saying measure twice – cut once? Something like that. Once those were all air nailed to the wall we started step 4!

Step 4: Paint and Fill
We used this fil stik to fill in all of the holes from the air nailer. It worked fabulously and you can paint over it! Then we got to painting. The wall looked fabulous minus the electrical outlet and ethernet box. Since we don’t use ethernet we patched the wall and covered that box. Then for the electrical outlet I found a paintable face plate. This really finished the look of the wall!

I’m obsessed with this finished look of the home office! It’s exactly what we needed to elevate the look and feel in this room. Now let’s make another one!