I painted my outdoor wall!

Part 2 of my deck makeover is here and this week it’s all about my outdoor wall. The wall next to my deck is a shade of yellowish magnolia that has been bugging me for the 5 years we lived here. Somehow I never bothered painting it though, I always thought in my next garden I will create a lovely outdoor space. But even though lockdown is easing down we still will be spending a lot more time at home this summer so why wait any longer making the space look amazing! Hit play on the video below to see the wall makeover.

When thinking of what to do with my very ugly wall I was looking in accent colours, muted tones and even outdoor wallpaper when I saw my friend Teri’s (from the Lovely drawer) post of her and her daughter in front of a plain wall. Teri is an amazing illustrator and give the wall a little makeover in photoshop to add colour and shapes, it looked absolutely amazing! Perfect for my wall I thought, so I asked Teri if I could use her idea and she said yes!

After building an outdoor table last week, see that tutorial here, we started on the wall. I say we as Ian helped me out with the wall. He wanted to paint the top of the wall, very nice of him so I didn’t had to go up the ladder, also helps that he is super tall :D Thanks for your help Ian!

I’m using Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in Paloma to give the wall a new look, the paint was kindly gifted to me by Annie Sloan. Did you know you can use Chalk Paint in outdoor projects? Me neither!! You do need to look at the weather forecast though as you need 3 days of no rain so the paint can cure. Especially walls that have texture or are porous are perfectly suited to Chalk Paint, it might fade a little over the years (just like most paints) but I will keep you posted on how it keeps up.

As you can see in the video we run out of paint, something went wrong with my order and I ended up with 2 tins instead of 4 so we had a weeks break in between the two layers of covering the magnolia up. By the look of the picture above Kiki thought it was rather funny we ran out of paint! You can really see the colour difference in that picture as in some of the video footage you hardly see a difference due to the strong sun. I am so pleased that the wall has a nice cool tone now.

Kiki helped me paint when the new tins arrived. Have a look out in the video to see her moving on from her brush and started painting with her fingers. She also moved on to painting the window later but unfortunately I didn’t had the camera on.

The wall was SO tricky to paint!! I’ve never seen a wall with as much texture as my garden wall. In hindsight it might have been better to use a spray system or paint with a very fluffy roller but we used big brushes and it worked out fine in the end, it just took a lot more time. Once the grey base coat was on I could add the fun shapes I was so looking forward to painting. For this I used Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in Old White, if you watched the video you would see me mixing a bit of the Paloma paint in with the Old White as I thought just the white was a bit too bright. I mixed 1/5 of grey in with 4/5 of white.

If you want to see the full reveal off the wall you have to tune in next week. There are few more things to do and them the deck is ready! I will do a proper before and after and will even show you what the garden looked like when we purchased the house 5 years ago :D

The Before

The during

The almost after..