Kitchen Makeover with Photowall

It’s been an exciting week at the I.E. Household as we’ve been in collaboration with Photowall who very kindly provided us with the opportunity to choose and install one of their rather fabulous wall murals.

Decoratively, our home has only really ever seen paint hit the walls so it was definitely a first for us to introduce a feature wall and one that could be considered a brave step away from the paint! So we basically went for it, with only the question of where to introduce some decorative colour and pattern!  The answer…. our most used and popular space, our kitchen/dining area.

Ready to find out more?

Kitchen Makeover with Photowall

If you’ve never come across Photowall before, they are in fact a Swedish company who have a huge passion for delivering high-quality design to your homes by way of wall murals and canvas prints. And just in case you were wondering, all their designs are environmentally friendly as well as fire-retardant. What’s also great is that they won’t fade in sunlight which adds to the longevity too! Oh, and don’t worry if you don’t live here in the UK, they ship worldwide!!

Our Kitchen/Dining Area

As much as this post is about showing how we transformed our kitchen/dining area with this easy to install wall mural by Photowall,  I also wanted it to be a helpful one for those of you that might be inspired or have been contemplating updating your homes.  With you in mind, I have tried to include as many tips and advice about the process to make life a little easier.

Before…

Ten years ago we extended our home to provide us with a rather fantastic kitchen/dining area. It’s become our most used space in the house and one that we frequently entertain friends and family in. As you can imagine, ten years is a long time in between decorating, but to fair, we love the tranquillity of the soft green and cream decor to this area and so hadn’t really given it much thought. It was, however,   looking decidedly tired and in need of a spruce up. More importantly, as much as we love our kitchen, it didn’t really have a focal point (unless you count the cooker) and also lacked any real character. A problem that some of you may be facing yourselves.

Another factor that we had to take into consideration when choosing our wall mural was our kitchen/dining area is part of an open plan space that connects to our other rooms. Whatever we decided upon it had to compliment both the kitchen/dining area as well as the connecting rooms. (If you’ve been following on Instagram, we painted this adjacent room and the front room a rather dark shade of grey just before Christmas which to be fair would go with most colour schemes.)

And just in case you were wondering this is the other end of our kitchen although there is more of it as there is a sink area to the right and to the left more storage and our fridge area.

Our Wall Mural Choice

I admit to being a bit of a crazy plant lady, (although no one can compare to my mum’s home which actually feels like your walking into Kew Gardens!) Choosing a nature-inspired wall mural was an obvious choice for us and one that would fit in with our current decor. We went for the rather bold Botany Banana wall mural which combined our love of nature as well as complimenting our existing decor.

Measuring & Ordering

Having decided where to put your wall mural, it’s essential to measure the height and width of the wall that you’re going to be hanging it.

TIP: When you order a wall mural from Photowall, there is a drop down box next to where you put your walls dimensions into. This recommends that you add between 3 and 6cms to the height and width of your walls dimensions. I added 6cms (the maximum) which of course made our mural larger than the wall itself. To be fair we could probably have gotten away with adding 3cms to the height and width. It’s better that the mural fills your wall out rather than running short because walls are not going to be the same height and width at all points of your wall.

The Preparation

Whatever wall mural you decide upon, it’s absolutely essential to get those walls prepared. The I.E. Hubs got stuck in filling in cracks and imperfections especially around the ceiling area as we had settlement cracks from the build all those years ago.  This was then sanded down to create a smooth finish.

The I.E. Hubs then went about refreshing the walls and ceiling. They definitely needed doing, ten years is a long time!! If you’ve recently decorated you may get away with this part, we clearly couldn’t!

What’s In The Box

It only took 3 days for our wall mural to arrive which was great as it timed perfectly with our preparation.

In the box, you’ll receive your wall mural which comes on a roll and wall paste ready to mix.

Our wall mural existed of 7 panels in total, with each one clearly marked including which way to hang each panel up! There are clear cutting lines to follow and it’s important that you cut out ALL your panels BEFORE you begin as the final panel may well only have a portion of your final image from your chosen wall mural. (In other words, the final panel may not be a full image and may well need to be trimmed down which was the case with our mural).

We laid all our panels out on the floor next to the wall and as we already knew when we ordered our wall mural was larger by 6cm, this was more obvious when laid out in front of the wall. This meant that although Photowall’s how to video shows you to hang the panels from 1 onwards, we had to work from the centre of the overall mural as the image would have otherwise been off centred.

Even if you haven’t added the margin of 3-6 cm, you need to lay out the panels in front of your wall, because you may just fall short when adjusting the panels to match as you hang. Forewarned is forearmed as they say!

Ready To Hang

The wall paste was easily mixed with instructions on the packet as to the quantity of water to add.

We were lucky enough to have a friend with a rather clever gadget that provided us with a straight guideline for hanging our first panel which actually worked out to be panel 4 after centring the image.

Photowall recommends pasting the wall roughly as you go to prevent the paste from drying out in between hangings, which to be fair is good advice as you never know when you’re going to be interrupted especially if you have children.

TIP: We had marked out on the wall from our guideline, 45cm increments (the width of each panel) to help know roughly where to paste the wall to.

The first panel going up!

Although things were a little tricky as the first panel, we had to cut out where the plug sockets were.

Once the first panel was up, the rest was an incredibly easy and quick process of hanging.

The guidelines and numbered panels made a huge difference in ensuring the correct panel was chosen which with a more complex and not so large motif would be hugely helpful.

Tah Dah!!! It literally took just over an hour to put up. How amazing does this look!!

Of course the faffing commenced the next day as we moved our plants back into the kitchen.

Changes

Apart from freshening the walls and ceiling with paint (the green is Overtly Olive by Dulux). We only had to change one aspect of the kitchen and that was to take down the curtains to our patio doors. They didn’t fit in with the large botanical image of our chosen wall mural. Removing them it actually made the kitchen feel a lot brighter and larger. Isn’t it funny how you live with something for years and don’t realise the benefit of changing or removing things (as in this case) to see a massive improvement in a room?

HOW TO CHOOSE A WALL MURAL FOR YOUR HOME WITH PHOTOWALL

I’m not going to lie when it came to actually choosing a mural, we were flabbergasted at the sheer amount on offer. Every conceivable colour scheme, imagery, theme etc has been covered by PhotoWall. There are literally thousands to choose from, which can leave you feeling a little overwhelmed. What’s great about Photowall is that they actually help by having the wall murals categorised which obviously helps narrow down the choice on offer. If you’re still undecided as to what to choose, I’ve put together a little guide below to help those of you who may want to be taking the plunge and installing a wall mural like us.

Take Into Consideration…..

• Consider your surroundings I know it’s an obvious one, but it’s a necessary one especially if you’re going for a highly decorative/image assessing your surroundings to see if it will look right is important (especially if you’re going to keep your existing decor).
• Take into consideration how you use your space. Assessing its use will help guide you as to what type of mural you want to install.
• Are you redecorating from scratch or are you using existing decor to use as the foundation of the mural you’re going to choose?
• Does the mural suite your style and taste?
• If you’re on a budget it’s always good practice to assess what other changes you’ll have to make to your decor. Will you have to replace accessories, soft furnishings etc?
• Colour scheme – Choose a mural that fits in with your decor that you either have in place if you want to keep costs low like we did or if you’re going for a complete redesign, carefully consider the colours in play and how they are going to work with the mural you choose.
• It may be that you centre your decor around the wall mural that you want to install, in which case be realistic about how much it’s going to cost as well as how much of your furniture, soft furnishings and accessories you’re going to have to change.
• Finally, my advice to you is go with what you love and makes your heart sing! It’s all too easy to worry what others are going to think. If I had gone with the reactions of family/friends, I would probably never have chosen the wall mural we ended up going for. It’s your home after all!

Photowall’s Offer

Photowall is kindly offering you all a 20% discount with the following code TheInteriorEditorCampaign2018 for the next thirty days from the date of this post so you might want to get in quick! And if you’re not feeling brave enough for a mural, Photowall have some amazing canvasses to don your walls with instead!

I’ll leave you with a quick video of how amazing this botany banana wall mural has transformed our kitchen/dining space.

So what do we think? Are you considering a wall mural or have you already installed one in your home. It’d be great to hear from you!

Thanks for stopping by!

Maria x

Disclaimer: I received the wall mural from Photowall in return for this honest and fair review.

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