Painting Baby G’s room 2 of 3
If any of your friends have striped a room you’ve already heard the horror stories. It is substantially more difficult and time consuming than just painting. There are numerous things that you can mess up that will make things infinitely more difficult. OK, So you’ve heard the warnings of your friends who’ve tried, you realize the work, and you still want to try the stripes. Here you go.
First a note on colors and types of paint, I highly recommend picking the color you like and then picking a color one lighter on the card. Some people I know have decided to do the same color in semi-gloss and flat. They have all regretted this, as the flat paint is ridiculously difficult to clean. If it is a child’s room satin is a good easy to clean choice. If it is a kitchen or bathroom you could bump it up to semi gloss, but its your room so pick whatever you want.
Pre Requisite:
Painting Baby G’s room 1 of 3
1) Planning Planning Plannnig
Here an ounce of planning can save you hour of difficult painting. First of all measure all of your walls, doors and, windows and make a little diagram. Now, since you have already painted your base coat you will want to avoid repainting all of the suckiest parts. A standard paint roller is 9” wide, so if you make your stripes 9 – 10” wide they will be the perfect width to hit with one pass of a roller.
So your goals here:
-Have the corners lie in the middle of a stripe. If you do not have to add more trim at the corners that would be great
-Minimize the number of corners you have to repaint.
-Minimize the trim you have to do
Use your diagram and mark out where the stripes will be, trust me it seems like extra work but it will pay off in then end.
EG: Baby G’s room had 5 internal corners, 2 of which had door trim an inch away. I avoided all of those but 1, and that one had >3 inches on either side of the corner making is suitable for the small roller. I did have to sacrifice and repaint the trim between the doors.
2) Taping Taping Taping
I used the blue tape (it was on sale), but they also had some green tape that was supposed to make cleaner lines, more on that later. I would not recommend the beige tape, but I would recommend shelling out the extra money for the wide tape. I used the 1” tape which was kind of narrow.
Get your measuring tape and start measuring out the distances you have carefully planned. After you have a couple marked, take a tack and stick it in one of the marks. Now you can just hook the end of your tape on and mark away. As you are marking put a small x in the sections that you are planning on repainting. If you are using 10” stripes the math should be pretty easy. If you are using 9” stripes just remember that all of the digits of multiples of 9 add up to 9. ie 27 => 2+7=9 also you can just increment the 10s and decrement the 1s. Or just learn your damn multiplication tables.
Once you have the top of the wall marked go back and mark the bottom in the same way. You may be tempted to use a plumb line to just make the lines as vertical as possible. You shouldn’t.
Brief aside about visual acuity and statistical tolerancing:
The human eye is very good at determining if lines are parallel, but not as good at determining if they are vertical. So as you are making your lines and you are shooting for It is much better if you are off like / / / instead of / \ /. Now what this means to you. If you use a level of a plum line any error would be random and you would be more likely to end up with the dreaded / \ /. By contrast if you measure uniform increments from the wall even if you have the same quantity of error it will be virtually unnoticeable on the wall.
e.g: On one wall I miss measured the bottom lines and was off by a whole inch from the top lines. The only reason I noticed the one set of lines that were /, the rest of the lines were virtually unnoticeable.
3) Double check all the lines
OK last chance. Take a good hard look at each line. Make sure your x’s all alternate properly. take a good look at each line. Here is a good time to use your plumb line. Once you start painting it is too late.
4) Set lines
One of the major pitfalls of masking tape is feathering. If there are any small gaps between the tape and the wall the paint will wic under the tape creating a feathering effect along the edges that you don’t want. The easiest solution is to use a hard rubber roller to make sure all of the tape is adhered firmly to the wall.
5) Now for the painting
And by now you should be old hat at this. If not, see painting baby Gutzmer’s room 1 of 3, step 6 – 10. Everything should still be clean from the first time and you have already done your masking. So:
Prep
Cut-in
Roll it up
Repeat
6) Remove the tape and admire your handy work / notice your mistakes
Now for the fun part (according to Cara) Grab the tape and gently but firmly pull it away at a 30 deg (pi/6) angle from the wall and from the line. It should come away cleanly without peeling any paint. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
7) Touchup
Grab your brush again and carefully go around and find all of the many small imperfections that fill your heart with shame. Go over it once with the light color and once with the dark color. If you did not have anything to touchup congratulations you’re a better man than I.
8) Admire your handy work
It’s been a lot of time and a lot of effort, now time to show all of your friends, take some pictures, write a blog?
nice sharp lines
While pregnancy certianly has its ups and downs, one of the best thing is the sweet parking at select stores. I'm not sure that telling pregnant women that you are one step above being in a wheelchair is quite the message stores should be sending, but as long as I am reaping all the benefits I will not complain.
Cut-in
Repeat
nice sharp lines 
