You know that feeling when you’re really excited about something you did and you just want to scream all day and all night about how excited you are about it? Well, that’s me right now and it all has to do with wallpaper I designed through Photoshop and had printed by Spoonflower that I hung on the back of my front door for the One Room Challenge. WHAT? The back of my front door?! Yes, I said it. The back of my front door!!! It’s crazy town/eye catching and I love it.

If you’re new to The 256 Project, well, HELLOOOOOO! I’m Régine and I live with my dude in a 1903 house in NJ that I affectionately call #thecozycottage and this blog is all about how I’m making a house a home through food, renovation and design, as well as sharing client projects on occasion.

If you’re unfamiliar with the One Room Challenge, visit here. To catch up on what I’ve been doing for the ORC, you can see my project intro week 1 post here, the moodboard and beadboard DIY week 2 post here, my DIY paint job week 3 post here, and my DIY stair runner design and install week 4 post here.

As you can see, there’s been a lot of DIY. In fact, we haven’t hired out for anything (except for changing out the light fixture, which actually happened months ago, so doesn’t count!). This past week continued the DIY trend and it’s all about the wallpaper.

Back in September, when the dude and I were galavanting around wine country in Germany, we went to a restaurant and were seated near the bathroom. Normally not an ideal location but this time it was: the bathroom door was covered in a beautiful, bold, graphic, floral wallpaper. The flowers were colorful and the background was this vibrant sky blue. I have been thinking of that wallpaper and the fact that it was on a door since that trip. While I did do a door DIY since that time, I was reserving the wallpaper idea for a better opportunity.

And that opportunity came in the form of the ORC. The whole point of zhushing up the entryway was to make it less boring and to have something beautiful or interesting to look at in every corner (I run the hashtag #everycornercounts on IG for a reason!), so why not find that wallpaper and put it on the back of the front door?

My wallpaper search yielded many a fun or beautiful print but nothing that felt right. I had something specific in mind so, of course, the only way to get something exactly the way you want it is to DIY, aka design it yourself.

Here’s what I did:

I don’t draw well so I found line drawings on the interwebs of flowers I like. I originally had drawings of a tulip, a hibiscus, a daffodil, and a lily.

I then copied and arranged all four flowers on a blank sheet in Keynote and saved that sheet as a jpeg file.

I uploaded the jpeg file into Photoshop and played around with color. I knew I wanted a bright sky blue background so I started with that and then filled in other colors. For every color, I used multiples, so the image wouldn’t appear so flat. For example, each flower has two greens within each portion of the stems and leaves. The tulip is coral, but I used lighter and darker versions of coral for each petal.

Then I transferred the final print jpeg to Spoonflower. Spoonflower is a sponsor of the ORC, which means that featured designers get gifted products for their challenges. As I am a guest participant, I don’t have access to the gifted products, but I wanted to use Spoonflower for this project as I have used them before and liked the end result.

Spoonflower offers different options for patterns of a print. I liked the mirror pattern best.

Once I saw what the print would look like, I went back to Keynote and Photoshop and played around some more. I removed the lily because the pattern of four flowers was just too busy and I liked the rounder edges of the other flowers. I played around with the colors. I finally settled on this print in a mirror pattern, which I ordered with an adhesive backing on woven paper.

I was nervous about what would arrive in the mail. It came about two weeks after I ordered it and I was ECSTATIC when it arrived. It was the kind of crazy town beautiful I was hoping for. And it was entirely my design (minus the part where I didn’t actually draw the original flowers, but minor detail).

The wallpaper arrived on a Monday, which allowed me to hang it last weekend. As soon as I was done marveling at it, I got anxious about what I had signed myself up for. For weeks, I was wondering how I was going to wallpaper the back of the door. You’re only supposed to apply wallpaper to flat and smooth surfaces. The door is smooth but it has windows and insets with beveling. How was I going to wallpaper that??!!

The main goal was to make sure that the mirrored pattern was on display on the largest flattest surfaces of the door so you would get the full effect of the design. In order to do that, I basically traced the door on a roll of paper and then laid out the traced door on the wallpaper so I could line it up correctly.

This worked mostly okay. I hung the paper from top down. Once I was done with that side of the door, I lined up the wallpaper on the other side of the door, all the while using the smoothing tool that Spoonflower provided to get out bubbles.