Easy Peasy: horizontal stripes

Well, it actually didn’t end up being as easy as I thought. But well worth the tedious steps!

Every time I see pictures of rooms with horizontal stripes I fall in love with them! When we bought our house I knew I wanted to put them somewhere. They have the perfect balance of class and contemporary style. Love love love stripes!

We decided to make our living room into our office area. Because of this we really wanted to make the room feel like a living room yet have the functionality of an office. Stripes seemed like the perfect way to allow for both, that and the amazing leaning desk/ bookshelf my hubs made ( blog post coming soon:))!

Here are the steps we followed to ensure beautiful, straight, gray and white horizontal stripes:

First, it’s important to decide on your colors and which one you want as your base color. We chose Benjamin Moore Stonington gray and Snowbound. Our base color was the gray.

Once your walls are painted the base color the stress fun can begin! Measure your walls from top to bottom and divide by number of stripes you are wanting. Our walls were 9 feet and we desired 9 stripes. This is where it actually got tricky. Since my husband was in charge of the numbers, he’ll take over telling you how he figured that out.

Since my wife wanted nine stripes and the walls were nine feet high, one would think it would be a simple task of measuring nine 12 inch sections. FALSE! For one thing, the baseboard, or wainscoting as it is more properly known, takes away three inches from the total length of the wall. So then, one might think its a simple task of dividing the remainder (105 inches) by nine to create equal stripes. FALSE! The second problem is the overhang on one wall. It is a foot long itself, which meant that the top stripe needed to be a foot long to make for a pleasing aesthetic. So then one meets the third problem, which is finding a way to evenly divide the remaining distance across the remaining eight stripes without having any one stripe be noticeably thinner than another. The trick turned out to be having each stipe be slightly thinner than the one above it. Since the top stripe needed to be 12 inches thick to be in line with the overhang, the remaining 93 inches were divided thus: 11 13/16, 11 3/4, 11 11/16, 11 5/8, another stripe measuring 11 5/8, 11 9/16, 11 1-2, and 11 7/16. Simple, right?… Isn’t he amazing? Seriously, never would have thought to do that!

Now for making super straight and level lines! We measured out each line using a tape measure and made marks down each corner wall. We also divided each wall in half and after leveling that point, made marks down each center line.

bless this man!!!

Next up, taping! The taping was extremely stressful and daunting! The entire time you’re fearing that your lines aren’t perfect. We used Frogtape for this task. To allow for the least amount of error, start at the top corner mark and have your helper stand at the middle mark. Tape at the inside of each line. Holding tape extremely taught before cutting. Repeat until each line is finished. Due to your base color already being finished your lines will look different in size, but rest assured they will come out perfect! The lines that were going to be gray looked smaller than the other lines as you can see,

. But tada we had now finished the nail biting part. After taking a step back we both exhaled, looked straight and even, phew!

Now for painting. This step I thought we’d just blow through, but it ended up being way more involved. Since our walls are textured it was extremely important that the tape was securely matted down. We also ended up needing two coats, ugh!! But after a few touch ups we finally finished at 1:30am.

Once you have finished painting, it is extremely important to remove tape ASAP. You don’t want the latex paint to be completely dry. Now it was time for the moment of truth. Did we do it? Did it work? It felt a little like Christmas morning taking the tape off😃 and we are so so thrilled with the results!

Now for the fun decorating part! I love being a homeowner 😃😃