Painting A Striped Wall

Now that the nursery walls are painted, I wanted to add a little something to them.  I've always wanted to do a striped wall and here's my chance.  I was noticing in my pinned nurseries, this one and this one had striped walls.  I thought about stripes all over but decided to go with a striped accent wall instead.

Here's the room with just the gray paint, Behr Silver Sateen.  Entrance into the nursery. 

Closet wall

This is the wall where the crib will go.  I wanted to make this the accent wall.

I chose to go with a simple white stripe to keep the room neutral since I will be adding bright colors later.  The color I chose is Behr Snow Fall.  I started by measuring my stripes.  The wall is eight feet tall making it 96 inches but I wanted the stripes to be the same width the whole way down.  Taking away the baseboard, that left me with 93 inches of wall to work on.  I decided I wanted seven stripes, three white and four gray ones.  That made my stripes 13.28 inches wide each.  

Starting at the ceiling, I marked 13.28 inches down and made a mark.  I did this about every 12 inches all the way across the wall for my first stripe.  I repeated this step all the way down the wall until all stripes were marked off.  Using a yard stick and level, I connected my marks across.  After the lines were drawn, I taped them.

Remember to tape the side of the stripes where the new color meets the adjoining wall.  You want a clean line there too.  I used a credit card to smooth out the bubbles in the tape .

Now for painting those stripes!  I wanted a clean, crisp line when I removed the tape.  I have seen several methods for doing this.  The first one involved painting the edge of the tape with the base color to seal the edge.  Once dry, paint with your stripe color.  This is supposed to keep the stripe color from bleeding underneath the tape.  Seems like a good way but I didn't want to pull out the first color.  The second method was the dry brush method.  It involves taking a nearly dry brush with very little paint on it to lightly coat the edges of your tape with the stripe color.  Sounded easy enough so this is the way I chose.

After the edging was dry, I filled in with a six inch roller.  The gray still showed a little through the white, so I applied two coats.  While the second coat was still wet, I took off the tape.  Let's say I was holding my breath to see some seepage but I was pretty amazed that my lines were perfect.  No bleeding!

I'm in love with the stripes.  I couldn't be happier with how they turned out.  I must admit though, it was challenging.  The measuring part was a little tricky because our walls and ceiling don't seem to be perfectly straight.  I'm kind of glad I chose to only do one wall.  I would have been nutty by the end of it.

So have you painted stripes?  Did you find it hard?  What were some tricks you used?

For more nursery progress:

Nursery Plans

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