I recently have been trying to create a vintage Americana-themed room for my son and got it in my head that I wanted to paint stripes. Had I ever done this before? No. But I did a lot of trial with different tapes and also a process that I think yielded close to perfect stripes on my son’s wall.
Something about stripes felt like old school boyhood and I felt that with a base of blue and white stripes his room could evolve as his interests change as he gets older. Right now my son is obsessed with the Cars movies and Radiator Springs, so pairing it with a neon route 66 sign, a framed flag, and some various branded Cars stuff fits the striped room SO cute right now.
Why Not Just Wallpaper?
Good question and something I asked myself several times as I was working on this! 😉 But truthfully it came down to 3 things:
- I wanted specific control of the colors of my stripes
- It was a bit cheaper
- I had just wallpapered our half-bathroom, which had sent me into a rage several times and made me swear I was never going to wallpaper again (something I likely won’t stick to)
The Stripe Painting Hack
The Tape to Use
If you’ve ever painted a room before, you know that the products and prep you do is one of the most important and time consuming parts. And when you are undertaking a project like painting stripes around an ENTIRE ROOM, you want the effort you are putting in to prep to pay off.
The BEST painter tape in my opinion is frog tape, and I specifically used the 1.88″ width. I also found that the Ace Hardware Clean Release in 1.88″ width was really good and a cheaper alternative, but I beg of you, don’t get the Scotch Blue Tape! It’s truly awful and will ruin your stripes. See the following video for proof 🙁
The Stripe Painting Process
1. Paint your base
Tape off your ceiling and floor/moulding first obviously and then if your wall isn’t already painted in your base color, go ahead and do that. Paint it in the lighter shade of the stripes. I did 2 coats of Sherwin Williams Snowbound as my base. Make sure it is completely dry before you start the next step of taping.
2. Hanging the tape
This part is going to be the most time consuming, but it is going to be one of the most imperative parts! You may want to start your first piece in a corner where no one may look carefully. Just like wallpaper, when you make your way around the room, it may not line up perfectly when your start and end match up and so your last stripe may be a bit bigger or smaller than other lines. Therefore, starting in an inconspicuous place will make that less obvious.
Also, just like wallpaper, you’re going to want to make sure that your first piece of tape is perfectly level. You’ll want to make sure your subsequent tapes are level, sure, but that first piece being level sets the tone for all other stripes. I used a carpenter level, but I imagine that a laser level would be incredibly helpful in this process. If you think you would use a laser level for other DIY projects in your house like added frame moulding or wallpapering, you may want to go ahead and invest in one. You’re also going to want to make sure that the tape is pressed down well and that there are no bubbles along the edges.
Once you get that first piece up, you’ll want to get another piece of tape to be your spacer/guide/pattern. I used a piece of tape that was the same width, but if you wanted something with more dimension, you could use a wider or more narrow piece of tape as your spacer. I lined this up against my first piece of tape (confirming that this piece was also level), and then added another piece of tape on the other side, flush against my spacer. At this point, you can remove your spacer tape and re-stick it on the other side of the piece you just hung to re-use as your spacer. This is a time consuming process, but once you do it for a bit, it goes faster and you get into a rhythm. This video may be able to explain this process better:
3. Repaint your base
This is truly the biggest key (aside from the brand of painter’s tape you use) to getting clean, crisp lines. Whatever color you used as your base, you will want to paint over your paint stripes with that color. Even the best tape (another plug for Frog Tape!) is going to have a tiny bit of bleed through, but when you paint it first with your base, the bleed through will just be the base color. Then the base paint seals off your tape edges, so that when you go to paint with your other color it will the cleanest line you can get. I only needed to do 1 coat of the Snow Bound color for this step.
4. 2 Coats of your new color
Once the base coat was dry, it is time for the new color! I ended up doing 2 coats of Sporty Blue by Sherwin Williams for my blue stripes, cutting along the ceiling with a brush first and then going in with a roller. Once the paint was mostly dry, I removed the tape (the most exciting part!) and you will have flawless stripes!
5. Touch-up with fine brush
Truthfully I just used a regular fine paint brush for this, but I really did not need to do many touch-ups at all in the areas where I used Frog Tape. There were a LOT of touch-ups where I used Scotch Blue though! PLEASE DON’T USE SCOTCH BLUE I’M BEGGING YOU!!!!!
If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy this post about our half-bathroom makeover!:
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[…] thought it would be really fun to give his room a vintage Americana theme so I PAINSTAKINGLY painted blue and white stripes around his room on the upper half of the wall and did board and batten on the bottom […]