Most of the places I’ve lived have had plain white walls that you weren’t allowed to change, so I always just draped everything in fabric or hung up a million pictures and posters. This is probably why, after six or seven years owning this house, even though we’ve decorated a lot, almost all the walls are still the same beige and white the house came with.

I’ve spent a lot of time in my beige-and-white living room, thinking about changing the walls and never getting around to it. Then we binge watched Amazing Interiors on Netflix and all those quirky and beautiful projects finally spurred me to action.

The result is a “test wall” in progress. I painted the chair rail and baseboards gloss black and stapled fabric panels and ribbon onto the bottom half of the wall. I’m not great at DIY so nothing is quite as precise as I’d like it, but in general I’m happy. The black trim is my favorite part and I’m thinking of extending it slowly throughout the house as a running theme. Along with that, my next step is to pick my favorite shade from the many violet paint samples I have and paint everything above the chair rail. I think it will look wonderful against the trim and all our black picture frames.

Mr. Robot doesn’t love the fabric, I can tell. But he doesn’t hate it, either. If it fails to grow on him, I’ll turn it into something else and pick a more abstract pattern for the bottom of the wall. I figure by Halloween we’ll both have a good idea how we feel about it. Either way, it was fun to do and the change is refreshing. I should act on my DIY dreams more often.