By Gene and Katie Hamilton

Even if you're not an artist, you can create a whimsical one-of-a-kind kid's bedroom décor using a paint-by-number wall mural kit that comes with a pattern and transfer paper. Think of the wall as a giant page out of a coloring book, and you have a big box of new crayons, and you get the picture. While wallpaper is always a popular way to decorate a kid's room, a wall mural makes it extra special.

The Web site www.elephantsonthewall.com has a large selection of mural designs, including nursery rhymes, jungle scenes, circus trains, cowboy towns and underwater scenes. There are many more designs, several with door huggers, patterns designed to surround a door, and options to customize the design with your kid's name.

For a mural kit that's 6 feet tall by 8 feet wide, you'll pay around $90 plus the cost of acrylic paints, which will run about $60 for the paint and brushes, depending on the mural's size. The kit comes with a color guide for the acrylic paint, which you'll find sold at craft store. A decorative painter will charge about $721 for a basic kid's room design.

Depending on your color scheme, you may want to paint the walls. But if they're clean and a color you like, you're ready to add the mural. Move furniture away from the wall and protect the floor with a drop cloth. The project involves taping the transfer paper and pattern to the wall using blue painter's tape, then tracing the design onto the wall with a ballpoint pen. The fun starts when you take brush in hand to paint the shapes and designs. It's about a weekend's worth of work, shorter if there's more than one of you wielding a brush.

Not interested in doing this yourself? You can find a painting contractor who has the skills and tools to do it right. Click here to get to Home Advisor, a local referral service that matches homeowners with local prescreened contractors.

That sums it up. Knowing the average cost to paint a wall mural lets you compare doing it yourself with what you can expect to pay a contractor. To customize the cost to where you live add your ZIP Code in the cost box.

Improvement and Repair Cost Updated 2019

The cost and time data is generated by averaging labor and material data from annually updated cost books used by contractors and refined by the authors' experience remodeling 13 houses. They are authors of 20 home improvement books and Do It Yourself or Not, a weekly column syndicated by Tribune Content Agency. The national cost can be adjusted by ZIP Code.