It’s here! The Healthy Heart Weekend.  It’s not too late to sign up, either.

Don’t forget to send me your picture along with what you did to javaqueen01 (@) yahoo.com by Monday so I can compile them.

I finished the stripes in the bathroom and thought you might like to see how I did them.  It actually wasn’t that hard. The base color needs to be dry for at least 24 hours before doing the stripes so you don’t pull paint off the wall from the tape.

The first thing you need to do is measure all the walls so you can figure out how many inches wide to make your stripes.  From the reading I did, most stripes are between 4 and 12 inches for the best look. All but one of my walls was easily divisible by 7, so that was the width I used for my stripes.  I marked every 7 inches along the bottom of the wall with a pencil.  I fudged the measurement for 1 stripe that was underneath the window to make up for the one wall that had a couple extra inches. It’s not even noticeable, either.

Then I marked every other space with a G to signify which ones were getting the gold stripe.

Obviously I took this picture after I painted.  Now this would be really easy if I had a laser level, but I don’t, so I took a straight edge and a little level to make a mark on the wall above each mark on the floor to line up the tape.

I also made a little card marked off at 7 inches to help me keep the spacing even – this was the handiest thing, it turns out. It made the process go much faster.

Then start putting on the tape.  I checked the top, middle and bottom of the tape with the card just to be sure my stripes weren’t crooked.

Now the trick with the taping is that you need to make sure you are taping off each stripe equally. This means the tape will be on the outside of the stripe lines you are painting and on the inside of the stripes you won’t be painting. It will look like this:

Does that make sense now?  I really checked twice to make sure I was painting correctly. So each of the wider areas are the ones that will be painted.  Really press the edge of the tape down, too. That way paint can’t bleed under it and mess up your lines.

Then paint.

It would be nice to have a roller that was wide enough to go over with one pass, but I could find 6 inch rollers or 9 inch rollers. And my stripes were 7 inches. So, I just used a small one.  You want to paint over the edge of the tape to get a good edge.

This metallic paint is somewhat sheer and dries very quickly. By the time I finished the last stripe, the first one was ready for a 2nd coat.  All painted here:

The gold looks really bright because it is still wet.  It’s a bit more subtle.

Then you want to pull the tape from the wall at an angle towards the stripe for a clean edge.

And voila! Stripes!

I am putting a chair rail at the top of the stripes around the room. I can’t wait to see that part. All in all, stripes weren’t that hard. I have to say that I don’t want to look at any blue painter’s tape for a while. It is a little time consuming to do, but fun. I don’t know if I would want to try a floor to ceiling stripe unless I had a laser level and another pair of hands.

 

Next up? Flooring!