How I DIYed an Accent Wall for Literally No Money

It involved a lot of paint chips and patience.

When you are living in a studio apartment with a wide open space, it can feel difficult to break up the space. You want everything to be cohesive, but you also want everything to have its own space. You don’t really want to feel like you are sleeping in your office. There are a lot of ways to try to find this delicate balance, but one way that has been particularly popular with millennials has been the accent wall.

You know the look. One wall in the apartment is set off with a different paint color or a wallpapered zone or a huge gallery wall. It certainly does set the space apart. But my landlord won’t let me paint, I can’t afford the peel-and-stick wallpaper that comes off easily, and a huge gallery wall involves buying a ton of canvases or art or pictures and assuming you can somehow make it all look good together. Plus, a lot of gallery walls can resemble a serial killer wall when assembled without the right je ne sais quoi.

I wanted to find an accent wall that wasn’t super expensive, over involved, or that would cause me to lose my security deposit. Luckily, you can make one on the cheap if you have a lot of patience and a lot of tape.

Even my cat loves it!

I had the idea of using paint chips for a while. One of my sorority sisters in college had a cool gradient in her apartment and I even attempted to replicate it in my first dorm room. It worked in theory, but not quite.

For perspective, my original college roommate moved out unexpectedly in the second semester, so I had a lot more room for decoration.

The method I ended up using involves a lot more patience and the use of a ruler, but the final effect is very cool.

What I essentially did was burgle Home Depot and take many more paint chips than would be reasonable for a normal paint job. All of the paint chips are free, obviously, but I had a feeling that it’s not exactly chill to take a huge chunk of just one swatch without the intention of ever buying a can of that paint. I snuck many more than my fair share into my purse and I only felt slightly bad about it. They are free. If they didn’t want you to take extras, they should have better security.

Thanks to Home Depot and Behr, I suppose.

I grabbed a bunch of swatches in different pinks. I threw in a couple of beiges and soft browns for good measure. And I grabbed enough that I wouldn’t have to go back. All of the swatches I chose were by Behr in their Marquee collection since they had a single color in each swatch.

Since each swatch had rounded edges and text inserts, I cut off the top and the bottom of each piece. I aimed for each one to be about 3” tall once cut, and I generally succeeded in that. If you have any patience, you will cut in small chunks and measure out every section so that they are all the same.

If you are me, you will put them in too large chunks, eyeball how long you think it should be, and cut too many at once with your good kitchen scissors. Some of mine ended up with diagonal edges because of this impatience, but it turned out fine.

Once all of your pieces are cut to size, arrange them in the gradient that you desire. You can have one straight line of each color if you’d like. I arranged mine in sequence and then bumped each subsequent row down by four swatches. I felt like this avoided feeling too repetitive or too on the nose.

Measure out on you wall how far apart the swatches should be so that you avoid overlarge gaps. I had about 1-1/2” of space on all sides of each swatch. If you have a long tape measure like I did, you can pin it to the wall for your first few rows. That way, everything will be in very straight lines. This is key since the higher up you get on the wall, the more likely you are to tilt your head, resulting in crooked lines. This happened a lot more toward the top for me since I am too short to reach that high, so a lot of the top ones required my standing on my desk and hoping for the best. If you’re not too picky, you can probably eyeball it.

Luckily, you can avoid the loss of your security deposit by using renter friendly solutions. For most of my wall I just used double sided tape. I used blue sticky tac for a few of the lower ones, which sometimes can leave blue residue on your walls. You can get away with normal tape most of the time. If you swipe some from your desk drawer or pilfer from your crafting supplies, you can avoid spending any money on this project at all.

My accent wall has served as the backdrop for my office area, my couch sat in front of it for a while, and it now backs my sleeping zone. It can certainly be painstaking work if you are picky, but it doesn’t need to be perfect. Few people are going to actually look closely enough to see if row #7 is 1-2” off of where it should be.

In the end, this project comes out looking very clean, crisp, and classy without much work or money on your part. It looks really involved, but it doesn’t require much artistry on your part. You just have to be patient and have a relatively level eye. You send a few hours on a step stool just taping things to your wall and suddenly your apartment looks so much more put together. Voila!