Urbane Bronze Office Walls

Can you guess what this is a picture of?

Yum!  It’s frosting!  Delicious, creamy chocolatey peanut buttery frosting… right?

Wrong.

It’s the poorly conceived/executed DIY idea of the previous owners.  And a major pain in the rear to fix.  Thank goodness they only did this texture in one of the bedrooms (and only on two walls) and the guest and master bathroom and not in every room in the house!

Remedying this DIY-gone-sour involved a 3” scraper, severely cramping hands, and subsequent braces for both wrists… But I finally got the walls from this:

To this:

To this:

There is definitely still some texture, but it is much less pronounced – in person even more subtle than in the above picture.  No more frosting peaks!  As you can see, we also went a very different direction with the wall color (and sheen) to get even further away from any dessert connotations.

The color is “Urbane Bronze” by Sherwin Williams, and I am very much a fan.  It was color-matched at Home Depot. – apparently they have Sherwin Williams and Benjamin Moore colors in their system! Definitely a good tip to store away for later paint purchases.

Anyway, I totally love this color.  It’s a charcoal gray with slightly warm brown/green undertones.  It may look blue in some parts of these photographs, but it really is not cold at all.  The color changes frequently depending on where the light hits from the window or the ceiling fan.

Also, doesn’t the clean white ceiling look fab?  I would never have painted this room dark when the original popcorn ceilings were still sucking up and hogging all the light, but now the smooth ceilings bounce so much light around in the room, that it doesn’t feel too cave-like at all!  The tall ceilings help as well.

This room is the large fourth bedroom upstairs (almost as big as the master bedroom!), and we are going to use it as our office and as Bryan’s music studio.

My ideas include:

• Build a two-person desk that takes up the full length of the short wall by the window, like this one via Young House Love. Update: DONE!
• Hang the distressed old barn-wood shelves in our garage for Bryan’s craft beer bottle collection. (He lives here too, and this is classier than it sounds. I am also a sucker for good graphic design!  Fun fact about me: I think designing labels for a craft brewery would be an awesome job!) Update: DONE!
• Hang Bryan’s super-gorgeous guitars on the wall.
• Bring up Eamesy and ET for lounging. Update: DONE!
• Gallery wall (I don’t care if these are overdone or not, I want it, and the ceilings are so high!) Update: DONE!
• A few pops of color like yellow or turquoise to keep it cheerful.

(View my Pinterest inspiration board for the office here.)

This room is the only room in the house that has completed Phase 1: popcorn ceilings defeated; ceiling spackled, sanded, primed and painted; walls prepped and painted.  So in that respect, let’s call it “done”!
Yes, there’s plenty more to do, but it’s fun stuff from here!  Accessories!  Artwork!  Decorating!  Yay!

What do you think of this wall color? Or the [shudder] highly textured walls? Have you ever seen anything that textured? We’re talking 2-inch peaks and valleys cut-yourself-if-you-scrape-against-the-wall textured. Crazy!