Well, being that I do a lot of laundry... I wanted to make my laundry "room" (more like, closet) more visually appealing. So I thought to my self, "Self, how can we do this on the cheap?" Well I'll tell you how... leftover paint. If you can get creative with some left over paint, you can do stripes; that is of course, if the colors compliment each other. You wouldn't want army green next to fuschia, would you? If you said yes, you should leave. LOL jk, no but really.
Over the past year or so, I have been a huge fan of gray, all shades of it. It's such a great neutral and to me, it's the new tan. I am sick of tan this and tan that. Tan is safe, tan is dessert like. Needless to say, I avoid tan if I can.. and I also rhyme if I have time. Hahahaha.
Anyway, I had a darker gray left over from our bedroom and a lighter gray left over from our living room. So I figured I'd put the two together as stripes. At first I planned on vertical stripes, but then I saw this blog and changed my mind. How awesome does this look? This blog contains some instruction you can follow, although there is a step I want to clear up, because it sure as heck confused me.
It is step 1, how you determine the width, or technically the length (since they are horizontal stripes) of your stripe. Am I confusing you? What I mean is how fat you want your stripes to be. You want them to be like the perfect, curvy woman... not too fat, but not too thin either. Anyways, in this blog she said she wanted 6 stripes. Which I knew what she meant, but technically she wanted 11 (when you count both colors). She was trying to say paint 6 stripes over the existing base color. Now.. she does this little equation (6*2=12-1=11).... What the heck?!?! I was so confused by this.. she didn't even explain it. It makes much more since to me to just figure out the TOTAL amount of stripes (light and dark) and then divide that into the height of your wall (in inches). In my case, the top stripe is the base color (light gray)) and the bottom stripe is the base color (light gray). So there are 6 light stripes and 5 dark ones, making 11 all together. I suppose her equation makes sense if you think of it like that, but I think it's easier to just figure out how many stripes you want. You can also practice with some crayons on some paper and see what you like. So once you find out the height of your wall, mine is 93", you divide by total number of stripes, for me it was 11 meaning each stripe is 8.45" "wide". After painting the whole wall in the base coat (if your wall isn't already painted, paint the base coat with the lighter color first), I made my markings with pencil. The rest of the steps in the blog I mentioned will help you through the process
Some tips that I learned along the way:
-Do not go much smaller than 8.45" of stripe width or it will be difficult to fit a roller in between the tape without making mistakes. When I held my roller side ways I probably had about an inch of clearance between the roller and the tape.
-Do two coats for the base color and then two coats for each stripe.
-Peel the tape off immediately after finishing your last stripe; the tape comes off much easier when the paint is still wet.
-I didn't have a laser level to make sure my stripes were level. I just used a regular level and made the pencil markings all the way around the whole wall. It worked fine.
I will upload another post when I finish the whole laundry room transformation, it is still a ways off from being done. But I thought a stripe "tutorial" would be helpful for any of you wanting to spruce up a small space. This would look great in a larger room as well, but I'm not that bold, so I went with a smaller space. I love it :)
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions reply and I'll get back to you.
Be blessed!
Jessica
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