the Morgan's: How to Paint Perfect Stripes

We get comments all the time from family, friends, the furniture deliverers, carpet cleaners, you-name-it that go something like, "Oh my gosh! Look at these stripes! They look awesome! How long did they take you to do?!?!"

Internet, let me let you in on a little secret. It looks way harder than it actually was... but Shhh. It's a secret. I plan to continue basking in the glory of our amazing hall and letting people think I'm just-that-awesome. Ha! But, since you're my awesome blog readers, I'll teach you how! ;-)

What do you need:

2 paint colors (if you aren't using the color that's already on the wall as one)
A paint brush/ roller
Lots of painter's tape
Yardstick
Pencil
Scrap sheet of paper
Mr. Clean Magic Eraser

Our hall was already white, so all I had to do was paint the dark color. If you have to paint both colors, go ahead and paint the entire wall with the lighter color first. (It's easier to paint dark over light than it is to paint light over dark.)

After that, do the hardest part, which is the planning. Get yourself a scrap sheet of paper and sketch out your wall. Measure where your chair rail is and draw it in.

Then, think about how many stripes you want to have roughly and do a quick calculation of about how many inches high each stripe should be.

Quick tip: Measure the area above your door so you don't end up with an awkward little strip of a stripe right above the door casing.

Now, I knew that I wanted my top and bottom stripes to be the darker color since the molding was white. Otherwise, the top and bottom stripes would appear to be bigger than the rest because the molding would blend in with the white stripe. Same goes for the chair rail - I wanted it to be nestled between beige stripes so it wouldn't seem bigger than the other stripes.

Once you've perfected the measurements and placements on your sketch, get a ruler/yardstick and make tick marks on the wall at the appropriate height in the corners and about every 2-3 feet. I found that spacing the tick marks out (as opposed to putting them so close together) helped me tape a neater line.

Then, take your handy dandy tape and with one, really long piece, tape from corner to corner using the tick marks as a guide. The key to a nice straight line = using one long piece of tape.