How to Hide an Ugly Wall Vent
There are many wonderful things about our house.
An abundance of ugly wall vents everywhere you look is not one of them (!!).
Here’s a shot of our dining room a while back, right when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with it.
See that ugly white wall vent peeking around the chandelier? Bain of my existence!
So what did I do to disguise it? I painted it to match my wallpaper. That’s it!
I thought for sure I was going to wallpaper the vent in the same sandy colored grasscloth that I had just papered my walls. Just like those people who wallpaper their wall socket and light switch covers. I thought I was a decorating genius!
But wallpapering doesn’t work well with vents. I was driving myself crazy trying to figure out how to cut slices into the wallpaper and then glue the pieces down. It became a huge mess.
So I hightailed it over to my local paint store and had them custom match a sample of my wallpaper, and the result is actually really terrific.
I KNOW in the pictures you can still see that stupid vent! But when you walk in the room I swear you do not notice it.
It gets completely lost thanks to the clever paint disguise.
What if my walls are just painted? The solution for you is easy! Just paint the vents the same color as your walls! Trust me! It helps the vent fall away into the background.
What if I have patterned wallpaper? The solution is obviously much trickier. I would actually try to steer away from white in most cases – you want the treatment of your wall vent to look deliberate and not like the “manufacturer’s standard”. Because you want to avoid any focus on the wall vent I would recommend going for the darkest color in the pattern.
So many of those home decor photos you see in magazines and Pinterest are really just fantasy. The TRUTH in decorating is that 99% of the time you’re dealing with niggling problems like wall vents! And don’t even get me started on electrical cords…
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