Our house is somewhat in the country, and while we still have neighbors close by we can also enjoy country living here. The house is open and airy feeling. I tried to keep this in mind when picking paint colors and really wanted to pick colors that were bright, cheery, and would make you feel welcome. I have never had a yellow room and so when it came time to paint my living room I wanted to paint it yellow. We looked at several yellows and finally decided on one. It didn’t turn out quite like I expected. Once it was on the wall it was much darker than I had anticipated it being.
It was suppose to be much lighter, and I was sick as soon as I started painting it. I was ready to scrap it all, and go get a new paint color. However, my husband and I started trying to come up with ways we could save it. My daughters had wanted us to paint wall stripes in their room, and I thought “You know that just might work in here.” I decided that if it didn’t work it was no big deal because we are going to have to repaint the room anyways!
So I started researching how to paint stripes on walls. All of the tutorials I found suggested painting the entire room with a flat base coat before striping. Well, I had used semi-gloss instead of flat but I decided to do it anyhow. I went to Lowes and choose a lighter color yellow off of the same color swatch that the current yellow was from. I bought it in flat so that the two shades would have the different texture.
When I stripe the girl’s room I will paint the entire room in flat first, and then stripe with a semi-gloss but since I had the semi-gloss on the wall first this time I did it backwards.
To make the striping easier I decided to make my stripes the same width as my paint roller. I believe it was nine inches. We then started taping off the wall with masking tape to stripe the walls.
As I looked at the tape stripes I was overwhelmed, and worried that I would forget which tape lines I was suppose to paint between. So I decided to label them.
I took a pencil and marked the stripes I was to paint by putting a “P” and an arrow pointing to the side of the tape I was to paint on each piece of tape.
Then I started painting. As I painted I would go back and remove the tape from previous stripes. It is important to take the tape off while the paint is still wet. If you let it dry it will allow the paint to soak through the tape and run.
It really didn’t take too much time to paint the stripes. From the time we started putting up tape until the time we finished painting the stripes it was about three hours. Our base coat on the wall had been drying for about a day when we applied the stripes.
I highly encourage you to give painting stripes on your walls a try, it really is not as hard as it looks and gives the room a great look. Everyone who sees it loves it.
