DIY - paint a straight liine.

Do you tend to put beauty and design of your bedroom last on your busy to-do list?  I do.  My room is an after-thought.  See?

That whole country shelf (which is a beast of a shelf), and all is not a reflection of me.  This is one of two rooms that has not been painted since we bought the house in 2002.  I have spent many hours dreaming of a painted a room.  But as I visualize the actual process: painting around 2 windows and four door frames, I'd pretend I loved this white color.  

The other issue I have had is the realization that I have felt a real-live earthquake in this house before.  If this hefty shelf fell on us it would do terrible damage to both of our heads and faces.  FOR REAL!  

So, I finally decided to do something small that would change these two issues.  

I would simply paint this section of the wall to make it kind of like a headboard.  To do that I simply needed to paint a straight line.

And this right here is the key.

It's a laser level.  I bought mine at Wal-Mart years ago and I've seen it on Amazon.  It's less than 10 bucks.  It comes with some sticky tack to temporarily stick to the wall.  But I don't like sticky tack.  I just use painter's tape.

For my project I just reached up as high as I wanted to paint without using a ladder (I am 5 feet tall) to choose my line height.  I grabbed my laser level and leveled it out then taped to the wall.  When you turn the laser on it looks like this.

I like to take a pencil and draw a few short guide lines along the beam in case the laser falls before I get my tape up.

Next, apply painter's tape to the wall either below or above the laser line.

At this point a really smart thing to do is measure the height of each end of the tape.  For this project I could just measure from the top of the window opening to the tape line.

Now you are ready to paint.  I haven't painted a wall in along time, just furniture.  I didn't have anything but foam rollers so it took me for.ever. to paint this small section, which is bad because I really hate to paint.

Now, if you skipped the step of measuring to see if your line was indeed straight and level then when you step away and notice your line is not level because you didn't carefully align the laser in the first place you'll need to fix it, but it's an easy fix:

Now that the area is painted just take the painter's tape off the wall while the paint is still wet.

Now the question is, what should I add to this wall?

My first idea was to add two lightweight floating shelves that I have.  But didn't I just remove a shelf so that we would not be killed by it?  Even though the shelves are light weight who's to say we wouldn't load it up with heavy stuff?

Or I could find a fun decal kind of like this.
But you know what I saw that I love?

And I'm not talking about the pretty weaved headboard.  I'm focused on the embroidery hoop circles.  I even have the pillow shams sitting in my closet.  I could use one for this.  I mean, my colors wouldn't be this bright, even though I love all of these bright colors!  I found this on LittleBitFunky.com  thanks to Pinterest.

And you know why else I dig this hoop art?  It makes me think of polka-dots! 

So tell me, what would you do if this empty canvas was before you?

P.S. Look how I dressed up a straight line in this room:

By dipping the measured and cut ribbon into liquid starch I could affix it to the wall along the straight line. By using the liquid starch I can simply pull off the ribbon without hurting the wall if I decide to do something else some day.  I had my Mom help me with the ribbon so that I didn't get liquid starch dripping on the walls.