The Ultimate Star Wars Bedroom

By: Jenny

Well, here we are again – another home improvement blog update. I have been a very busy bee.
First off, As promised, here is the story about the boy’s bedroom…

Jay had bought a Star Wars wallpaper border for the nursery FOREVER ago. I nixed that idea. – Stormtroopers in a baby’s room? I wasn’t a fan. So we went with sailboats. Super cute and baby-friendly. Unfortunately, the soothing seascapes didn’t help Victor to become a calm toddler. So now that we have had the great gender divide at our house (as I said in my last post), it was time to redecorate! Star Wars theme, here we come!

We already had gray paint on hand from when we used it as primer for the kids’ wacky bedroom painting when we did the nursery.

I call this color “Millenium Falcon Gray”. It actually has a blue tint to it – I love it. And it matched up with the wallpaper border amazingly well. So I go to painting – I only had enough to do 3 walls from top to bottom. Also,I only had enough wallpaper to do the same 3 walls – and even then I had to get creative. So I hand-painted the boys’ names into the border area – after looking up the main Star Wars font online. I think it looks pretty awesome:

I drywalled the murphy door to give us some more usable square footage in the room as well – the end result of that is alright… it was my first drywall attempt, so it’s not perfect. But it will do for now.

OK, so what to do about the 4^th wall? After some discussion with Jay, and my coworker (who I actually have to credit with this concept – Jones, you rock) we decided to throw caution to the wind, and paint the boys’ Star Wars story in crawl script on the wall. Because, what boy WOULDN’T be thrilled to A) have their own Episode of Star Wars, and B) wake up and go to sleep to the opening frame of said Episode. ?

Episode VII
Path of The Jedi

And, I have 3 weeks to dedicate to hand-painting lettering on a 3’ x 5’ section of a bedroom wall. Oh wait… I don’t. but somehow we pulled it off. First I played around with the font and angle, to get it as close to crawl script as I could, but still legible. Surprisingly, Microsoft PowerPoint ended up giving me the desired effect.

Ok… so how do I get that up on the wall? The first thought was to use a digital projector. But how could you see the projection on a black surface? Wouldn’t we block the projection while tracing the letters? It seemed like a good idea at first, but would it become too burdensome in the long run?

Enter the large-format printer. I printed the script on 36” paper, and began the daunting task of cutting out each individual letter. You see, the wall we were painting was yellow already, so I needed to trace out each letter and fill in around with black. So each line was cut, and taped up, and Sharpie-markered out. I began to go a little bit insane.

We tried to keep it a secret so that we could surprise Ethan with the final product. Note: trying to hide something that huge from a nine-year-old boy is pretty much impossible. How do you hide a wall, anyway? So he saw it half-way through. I was concerned about his reaction, because he seemed a little confused at the time. But, I suppose when all you can see is inverted colors and half of the storyline, that is to be expected. He was anxious to see it finished. So was I.

So, the lettering was done, and the black paint started to fill in. finally, I added stars – silver acrylic paint randomly arrayed on the wall. Just like the movies. It was done. Ethan was thrilled.