A while back, I blogged about us starting our guest room makeover. We had gotten tons of inspiration on what to do with the space, but the one idea that kept coming back to us, was to do stripes on the walls.
Although we love the idea of paneling a room (which we actually did in our master ensuite), most of the walls in our house not straight...at all. Which makes paneling very difficult in our home! So we decided to add interest to this room through stripes and paint.
We decided on a bit of a rustic/cottage feel to the room inspired by the fact that this room would be occupied by out of town-guests and visitors. The idea of a "homey" feeling space seemed to be the right fit.
We wanted the colours in the room to be natural and a bit rustic, and to incorporate light colours, creams and turquoises. We searched for tutorials online of how to do the stripes, and were hugely inspired by Layla and Kevin at The Lettered Cottage and their striped reading room:
Love that room! They've actually modified the room since doing their stripes and it now looks like this:
I absolutely love both versions, but still wanted to try the stripes in our space.
So, we got our paint, bought a laser level, and thought we would just figure things out as we went. Once piece of advice if you plan on doing stripes, pick a SMALL room. The room we chose to do is not huge, but it is a decent size and taping the stripes took FOREVER. My main concern was making those stripes level!
We bought 2 containers of frog tape last summer, and figured this was the perfect place to try them out.
The taping took us about 2 evenings to complete. In the end, we had figured out a system, and it worked quite well. We started with using a laser line- one person holding the laser to cast a line on the wall, and the other taping below or above the line. That worked for about 20 minutes- its not easy holding that thing straight!
So we tried another tactic- one person holding the level and the other taping just above it. That didn't last long either. In the end we decided that one person holding the level and making small marks on the wall, and the other taping below the marks was the best way to go.
We started at the ceiling and marked 12 inches down. Ian then used the level to go around the room and mark every few inches a small line that we could use as a guide for taping. The challenge we faced was that not only were our walls not straight (they bow in the middle), but the tops of the casings on the doors, did not match the tops of the window casings.
Once we used the tape and placed a line, we levelled each line of tape before moving on. Sometimes we had to fix the tape, but most of the time it worked quite well:
We finished taping and left the tape for one day before painting. We started painting the next day, and let the paint dry for 1 day. Then we took the tape off. At this point we figured if the lines weren't straight and looked terrible, we could just paint over the entire room....sigh.
However....we peeled off the first line....and yea!!! The frog tape worked awesome!! I totally recommend it. We didn't have any bleeding, lines were crisp and straight (phew!) and it turned out exactly the way we hoped!
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