DIY Modern Accent Wall

Now I know I haven't made a video in a really long time, but I have made something else pretty special. And this is for this. We just started working on the nursery and I always thought it would be super cool to do one of these modern geometric accent walls. So I thought that I would take the opportunity and share it with you guys. I measured my wall and then drew my design on graph paper. I watched a lot of YouTube videos and read a lot of blogs about doing accent walls before I actually committed to the project and I noticed that a lot of people use wood for their strips and a lot of people use MDF. I chose to go with 1x2 pre-primed MDF strips from Home Depot because they will hold their shape better and you don't have to ever worry about them bowing or warping like you might with wood. The other thing I noticed was that nobody pre-painted their boards or their MDF pieces before they put them on the wall. I'm going to try and pre-paint everything before I put it up. I'm going to have to fill some nail holes and probably some seams so I know that I'm going to have to touch up but I'll probably just have to roll the front face and it'll make it a lot easier than having to try to get in all the corners with a brush. Some people frame in their walls and some people don't. I personally like the look of it framed in more so I went ahead and measured all four sides. Make sure you don't just do like the bottom and the side because if it's like my wall you might have an eighth of an inch difference between the top and the bottom and then you don't want that kind of gap in your MDF or your wood. So measure all four sides using 45 degree corners. I already got my pieces cut so I'm going to go ahead and put that up. So this is absolutely a project you can complete 100% independently however it is a million times easier to have a second person to hold the measuring tape and trim for the longer pieces. So I did the first couple pieces by measuring off my little sketch and then I switched to using a spacer which made it super easy so I definitely recommend that if your pieces are equal distances apart. I'm using an 18 gauge brad nailer with inch and a half nails but a 16 gauge would work too it would just leave slightly bigger holes. I want to go see which one I should do next and I looked at my little sketch and realized that there's still supposed to be another piece that goes across here so I had to pull this off and I was I was like I don't know how to get this off but you can just like literally pull it out. I should have showed you but I didn't. I used a spacer to figure out where my next piece needed to go and then I used a scrap piece and a square to extend my lines and get an exact measurement. And keep in mind that it is definitely better to cut your piece a tiny bit too long than a tiny bit too short because you can always cut it shorter but you cannot make it longer. So I'm just about to put up my last two pieces and I'm very excited. At first the whole project like when I first started putting them up seemed a little bit more complicated than I thought it was going to be but once you kind of like get in the groove get in the swing of things it's pretty straightforward pretty fast and I'm really excited to have all my pieces up. So this step isn't totally necessary but I felt comforted by having a few nails in studs at least so I just set up my laser level to go along each stud and I'm just going to nail where I can into the studs. I used spackle to fill in all my nail holes and seams and then gave it a gentle sand. You can use an orbital sander for this part but I didn't find it necessary. I chose spackle over wood filler because I thought it was a little bit softer and would be easier to sand off. Once I finished sanding I vacuumed my entire wall and wiped it with a slightly dampened cloth before I gave the front surfaces one more roll of paint. Also I was very happy that I had pre-painted all of my pieces before putting them up so I highly recommend that you do the same. Well that's that. Now it's time to decorate the rest of the baby's room and we'll see what other kind of DIY is coming out of that so make sure you stay tuned.