Yikes, Stripes!

So now that the nursery was cleared out, we begin to tackle my one "requirement" in the room - a striped accent wall. Since we aren't repainting the room, I wanted to do something fun to the wall where the crib will go. It did take a few days to convince J that it was a fabulous idea to paint the wall with navy blue paint - he is not looking forward to having to paint over it, but I prefer to look at the present and the stripes will definitely be staying until we move out of this house (which is probably a good 5-7 years away).

It really wasn't hard to find the right shade of navy blue paint - basically because there was only 1 paint swatch in all of Home Depot called "True Navy". Everything else was too royal, too bright, too dark, etc. I wanted navy and we got navy! We went with a paint in primer in one and I was pleasantly surprised to find that we only needed to do two coats of the blue, I was thinking it would take at least 3 to get good coverage.

I read about a million tutorials online on how to paint stripes. I won't try to give you my crappy tutorial, but the best one I found was Centsational Girls tutorial, where she talks about "sealing" the tape with your lighter base color before painting the darker color. Her post explains it a lot better than I can, so if you are doing stripes, I would use that tutorial as your guide. Young House Love also has a good tutorial on how to measure to find the thickness of stripes that will work on your wall size.

Anyways, after we figured out that we needed to make our stripes 11.6" each, we got busy with measuring and taping off. Let's just say, this was quite a test of our marriage. I think every couple should have to paint a striped wall as part of pre-marital counseling - it was seriously a lesson in patience, teamwork and hormones! But we survived and got everything measured and taped off in about 1.5 hours. Here's the pictures of our progress:J measuring and leveling everything out. We used Frog Tape and I would highly recommend it!After all the tape lines were up, we marked the stripes that were staying white with little piece of tape. I would highly recommend doing this, especially for high contrast stripes like ours, because I would have cried if we accidentally painted a stripe blue that was supposed to stay white after all that hard work of taping off. This is a gross picture, but I wanted proof that I actually did help! We went over each tape line with a credit card to really make sure it was sealed well. And this picture reminds me that it's time to call my hairdresser for a highlight touch-up! Yikes!And here's J "sealing" the tape with the white paint - basically he painted the stripes that were going to be blue with white first to make sure if there was any bleeding, it would be white on white and not navy on white. I truly believe this is what got our stripes to come out so crisp with no leakage or dripage at all! Then we painted our 2 coats of navy blue and peeled the tape pretty much immediately. You are supposed to peel the tape while the paint is still wet/damp so that it doesn't bleed. I do not have any pictures of the tape peeling process because I was literally going back and forth between covering my eyes because I was scared and jumping up and down with excitement.

Here's the wonderful after shots!
This is immediately after we peeled the tape and we admired our handiwork! You can tell the paint is still drying here. We're really happy with how they came out and even J admits he loves the wall and he's happy we did it. Success!! This is the corner where the rocker will go. Close up of the insanely crisp lines - it's crazy to me how straight and smooth they came out. No touch up required!Here's the full completed wall. It really makes a big impact and I'm so freaking happy with it!And this is the corner where the crib will go - which will actually be set up TOMORROW! Tons of progress going on these days!

So that's the story of our stripes and how our baby boy will have a very bold accent wall to stare at as he's (hopefully) drifting off to sleep. Next step - we get our rocker and actually start hanging things on the wall!