Indoor gardening has really become a passion of mine over the last decade. Right out of college, though, plants weren’t at all on my radar. They felt way too intimidating, and I don’t really remember my parents keeping many in our house growing up, so maybe it just wasn’t something I was even that used to from a DIY interior design standpoint. Now? Well, you probably know that there’s not a single room in our home that isn’t packed with plants. Some are real, a few are fake, but they all go so far in adding stylish texture and color to our spaces.

One of the most frequently asked questions that I get here on my blog and on social media is how I keep our pets out of the plants throughout our house. To be honest, it used to be much, much easier (get my initial set of tips here). Our three older cats were never all that interested in digging in soil and chewing on leaves, but our kittens in this house have been a totally different story. Now I understand why you guys are struggling so much—we’re right there with you! I’ve had to make a lot of compromises with our plants because of the kittens in the past year and a half, and one of the very best solutions that I’ve come across is hanging our plants up high so they’re out of reach from curious paws and teeth.

So far, I’ve done this by using hanging plant holders installed into the ceiling, but last month I decided to test a different method—wall-mounted plant hangers. I saw someone on TikTok using this technique, and I thought it was genius. I find that it can be really difficult to find a wooden rafter to screw my ceiling-mounted plant hooks into (especially if the ceiling is textured), but the wall-mounted method means that I can just use my regular old stud finder to drill into a good support for my plants.

I purchased these metal planter pot ring holders on Amazon, and was able to screw them right into a stud in our guest room. Before installing them, though, I took the rings with me to our local gardening center to buy pots that fit them exactly. The gray plastic ones that you see pictured above were the only ones that fit the ring holders I had bought, so I didn’t really have a choice when it came to color. Gray isn’t a tone that I often gravitate toward in home decorating, but I figured I could always paint the pots later on if the color really didn’t fit our aesthetic.

Fast forward several weeks, and that gray just stuck out like a sore thumb to me. There was nothing else gray in our guest room, so the pots drew the eye in a not-so-great way, which meant that I ultimately broke out my paint brush and a can of old paint. I decided to use the same creamy white color that we used on our kitchen cabinets last year when we painted them (“No Filter” by Clare Paint), and it went on the pots like a dream.

The plastic pots themselves had sort of a rough texture to them, so I didn’t need to prime them. I just painted three thin and even coats of the new color on the pots and let them dry for a few hours before popping them back over the wall-mounted rings. I didn’t even take the plants out! Just painted right around them. I stopped the new paint color right at the pot rim’s edge since the original gray color blended well with the dark brown soil inside.

I think the new creamy white color of the pots looks much better and more (dare I say it) demure against the 1960s botanical wallpaper in our guest room. Now, the plants feel like a softer focal point in the space, and help nicely fill this awkwardly blank wall where I didn’t want to just default to hanging art. I wanted something more unique and interesting, and these wall-mounted plants check all the boxes for me. The plants are pretty wimpy and tiny now, but just imagine them when the vines start to trail down beyond the rim of the pot and the leaves get bigger and more sculptural. I can’t wait to watch this installation evolve over time. Stay tuned for growth updates!

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