Laundry Room Makeover - How to Paint Stripes

The weather here in Utah ruined my plans this last weekend for finishing my garden in the backyard, and getting family pictures taken. I was so disappointed, but was determined not to let the husbands three day Easter weekend go to waste. So I put him and his brother to work in the laundry room for a quick weekend room makeover.

I have been using frog tape lately for various projects of mine that have require me to use paint blocking tape. I have really liked it, and have thought it has lived up to it's claims. I was checking out their website the other week and found this great picture of a striped hallway on their homepage.

I loved it! I have a favorite piece of fabric that is white and gray striped, and I am still waiting to find the perfect project to use it for. So I thought, what would be even better than my favorite fabric? Having a room in my house that makes me feel like I am living in my favorite fabric!

I had the husband replace the stock dome light with this black lantern style indoor/outdoor pendant light that I bought off of craigslist for $10.00. I have another one that I will put in the laundry room bathroom as-well. I wish they were a little bigger, but I think they look fun. I have to fix the paint on the ceiling though, because it looks like the previous owners (the bank) just painted around the dome light.

We then went to work marking off where our paint stripes would be. You want to first decide how big you want your stripes to be and then measure them out on the wall with a tape measure marking your stripes with a pencil mark on the wall about every foot or so. We wanted this project to be quick and easy, so we made sure that we would start and end with a white stripe so that we did not have to do as much cutting (painting against trim-work or ceiling with a brush).

After we were done marking everything we began to tape. When you tape the stripes off make sure you are placing the tape in the correct spot. Depending on what stripe you are painting your tape will either go above or below your marks. Check your tape once placed on the wall to make sure your tape is level. Not all walls are level and that could effect your marks and taping, so make sure to double check everything before painting. After we finished taping we ran the edge of a credit card over all the tape to make sure it was adhered well to the wall, and that there were no bubbles.

*opposite of what this picture is showing I would recommend to paint horizontally with the tape to assure you do not pull the tape up while painting*

Next step paint! I used the same color gray that I used on my kitchen table which was San Antonio Gray by Benjamin Moore (mixed in Behr paint from the Home Depot). We used rollers to paint the majority of the taped off sections. Make sure you paint the right section! I was really paranoid about this because I do not have the white paint for this room. So touching up and fixing mistakes was out of the question. Then we used our Purdy brushes to do the cutting in the corners and edges. Purdy brushes are a must for any good paint job, don't waste your money buying cheap brushes. The tricky part here is that you do not want the paint to dry too much because it could affect the tape and the sharpness of your line, but you still will probably need to do two coats of paint. We waited about 10 minutes or so before doing the second coat of paint, and cutting. So if you are doing a big area it would probably be best to work in little sections rather than rolling a first coat on the whole room. It will just leave you scrambling to get all the cutting done in-time for a second coat.

Then comes the fun part! peeling off the tape to reveal your freshly painted crisp stripes.

We removed the tape immediately after painting the second coat. You want to double check that all your tape edges are well painted. Remember you can always touch up the center of the stripes, but the edges where the tape is will be almost impossible to touch up afterwards. This was the biggest project I have used frog tape on and it really pulled through for me. I had almost no touch ups or bleeding to deal with. The little that I did have was quickly removed or fixed with a wet Q-tip since the paint was still fairly wet after removing the tape. It was critical to me that my tape work well, since like I stated before I did not have the white paint used in this room.

I love my "new" laundry room. It makes me so happy to go in there that I may actually do laundry. I am still trying to decide what color to paint the cabinets in there. White, gray, or blue are the choices. Let me know what you think I should paint them. Now all I have to do is a little accessorizing and I think I will have a pretty spiffy laundry room.