My Inspiration & Plan For A Colorful Home Gym

In my last post, I shared with you the plan for the layout of our home gym that I’m currently working on. If you missed that, you can get caught up here…

While I had the layout pretty clear in my mind, I wasn’t so clear about how I actually wanted to decorate the room. Colorful? More subdued? Most of you seemed to agree that our home gym should be colorful. I was hoping y’all would say that! After looking at so many home gyms online, and seeing that most of them were very neutral and almost void of any color at all, I knew that I probably wouldn’t be happy with that kind of colorless room in our home.

So I went to the place where I always go for inspiration — my Instagram account where I have saved probably 300+ colorful rooms for inspiration. And I started scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling, to see if one particular photo caught my eye for inspiration.

And sure enough, one did — this ombre rainbow fence from At Home With Ashley.

I have loved this fence ever since she revealed it on Instagram over a year ago. And in fact, her whole bright and colorful house is amazing and inspiring to me.

So I think I’m going to use this inspiration as a jumping off point for our home gym. The colors I end up with will probably be a bit different, but I want them to be equally as light and colorful.

I have a vision in my mind of how I might want to implement this idea in the home gym, and while I tried to do a mock up using my photo editing, my mock up leaves a lot to be desired. 😀 But if you’ve been reading my blog for long, you’re familiar with my sad little mock ups, and you’re used to having to kind of squint, tilt your head, and use a whole lot of imagination to see my vision. This is no different.

Anyway, when you walk into the room, the far wall will be where the Swedish ladder is. Since that already has a horizontal stripe design on its own, I want that wall to be a solid color so that the finished wall doesn’t look too busy and chaotic. And then I want the side walls to be the ombre rainbow stripe design with vertical stripes. (The hallway has horizontal stripes, so I want vertical in this room.)

Now my big decision is whether I keep the ceiling white, which feels like a very safe option to me, or carry the stripes onto the ceiling. If I keep the ceiling white, that might look something like this.

I did this quickly, and those colors are way more saturated than the ones I’ll probably end up using in the room. (Again, go back to Ashley’s gorgeous fence to see what I’m aiming for.)

And please keep in mind that the actual wall won’t have any black stripes on it. Those black stripes were just necessary for my sad little mock up so that I could fill in the blank areas with color and the fill would have a stopping point.

So again, squint, tilt your head, and use your imagination to see what I see. 😀 No black lines and colors that aren’t quite so saturated, but you get the general idea. I would imagine that I’d end up with stripes that are somewhere between eight inches and twelve inches wide, depending on the number of colors and the width of the room. So they won’t be tiny little stripes that make a person dizzy upon entering the room.

But here’s the real question. Do I play it safe and just keep the stripes on the walls? If I do that, I’ll install crown molding in the room and paint the ceiling pure white, just like I’ve done in almost every other room of the house (except the music room, hallway bathroom, and my studio). I do love crown molding and a pure white ceiling. But again, this is the safe option, and if there’s any room in the house where I could get a bit crazy (other than my studio bathroom), it would be a home gym, right?

So the other option is to carry the striped design on the ceiling. They would be continuous stripes up one wall, onto the ceiling, and down the opposite wall.

Again, you have to squint, tilt your head, and use your imagination here. And remember, there will be no black lines, and the colors won’t be this saturated. The stripes will be between eight and twelve inches wide. So this looks way busier than the actual end result would be. But this will give you an idea of what I’m talking about…

I mean, I kind of want to go for it. 😀 And I know (probably better than anyone) that it’s just paint, and if I don’t like it, I can paint over it. But this would be some tedious and backbreaking work to do the ceiling as well. But I think it would be fun and exciting, and I just have this feeling that the result would be worth the effort.

What do you think? Can you picture it in softer colors and without the black lines in your mind’s eye? Do you think I should go for it? Or keep it safe with crown molding and a pure white ceiling?