My Favorite Wall in our Home

A couple months ago, I shared the initial progress on painting the staircase landing from our garage into our house, and as of today it is finally finished!

This may sound like a weird project to focus on when the list of things I want to do in our house is so long, but I had special plans for the wall along the landing. I wanted to make it a place where we mark the heights of our kids as they grow up. I have always wanted to do this once we got to our “forever” home and as soon as we moved here I started looking for walls that might work for this. I decided that this wall is perfect: it’s out of the way, so it won’t contribute to the overall aesthetic of the house and I’m not worried someday I’ll want to change the paint color, but the garage entrance is the one we use everyday (or do when we’re not staying at home all day every day ha!) so it’s a wall we will see every time we come home. I didn’t want to spend a ton of money on the space since it is our garage, but I did want to spruce it up at least a little from where we started here:

Dingy walls with tons of dings and nicks – I wanted a clean slate to start our measurements. What was supposed to be a very simple job of patching + painting walls turned into a little bit more of a project because once I painted the walls, I decided I also wanted to paint a fun color on the little door leading into our attic…

…which led to me thinking “well with the walls and the door painted, now the stairs are looking pretty shabby” so I painted them as well. If you give a mouse a cookie, right?

I also did a quick coat of gold spray paint to freshen up that little door handle. All of this was done with paint I already had leftover from other projects, which meant this project cost a grand total of $0. It took a lot longer than I anticipated, because I had to wait for warm enough weather to paint (tricky in March in Indiana). Eventually, I will finish the rest of the staircase leading down into the garage but I didn’t have enough paint and this project had already expanded enough at this point.

The walls were actually painted two months ago, so we were able to measure LJ in February. Honestly, the hardest part of this entire project was getting him to stand still enough against the wall to get an accurate measurement, ha!

He loves pointing to his little mark and now that the date is also marked there, he loves to talk about the numbers he sees there too.

I think we’ll measure Vi for the first time when she’s able to stand on her own. Eventually Justin and I will mark ourselves and I think it’d be fun to mark the heights of our dogs too. I don’t really have plans to measure ourselves on a rigid schedule, just maybe 2 or 3 times a year or when our kids hit growth spurts. I think this will be such a special way of documenting the life of our family in this home!

Someday, I may even expand it beyond family. My best friend growing up had a wall in her garage where her family marked their growing heights and they even had other friends mark their heights when they visited, which I think it a pretty awesome idea. Our wall is certainly big enough to have a section for other people, and I love the idea of possibly using it as a guest book of sorts. Can you imagine this wall someday with our kids growing up and all the people we’ve loved who’ve come through here and been part of our lives? For now, we’re keeping it just our family but that’s definitely something we may do in the future. We want our home to be well loved and I think this is just such a cool way of really making it “ours.”

It may not look like much right now, but this wall is already my favorite in our entire house and I can’t wait to watch it change over the years. ❤

Sources

Wall Color: Sherwin Williams Mindful Gray

Door Color: Sherwin Williams HGTV Oceanus

Stair/Railing Color: Sherwin Williams Urbane Bronze