Gettin' Horizontal!

No, not that kind of horizontal, I'm talking about our latest home project! Matthew and I finally decided to add painted stripes to our living room walls after spending so much time admiring them on Pinterest! I will admit there were a few minor hiccups along the way but all and all it wasn't too bad. I really appreciated all of the hubby's hard work and patience helping me with my latest project! I'm pretty sure he cringes every time I log onto Pinterest {which is way more than I should} because he's just waiting for me to find something else our home needs!

To begin you'll need the following stuff: frog tape, paint, rollers, rolling tray, paint brush and a tape measure!

We ended up using frog tape over the typical blue 3M painter's tape for a few reasons. For one, it's really easy to move around the walls which is important because you'll want to adjust the tape so it's a nice and straight line. Also, this tape doesn't leave behind any residue at all, in fact, you can leave this tape on the wall for up to 21 days and there's still no residue on the walls, you can't do that with the blue stuff! Last but not least, I think this tape is the best for really making sure the paint stays put and doesn't bleed through causing uneven stripes!

Once you've gathered your supplies you'll need to start the measuring process! In order to figure out how wide each stripe should be measure the wall from top to bottom then divide by seven, or any other odd number depending on how thin or thick you want the stripes! It really doesn't matter just as long as you're dividing by an odd number! From the ceiling to the molding it was 80 inches so after dividing by 7 our stripes were about 11 inches thick! Perfect!

After you mark the measurements you'll need to carefully tape the walls! To avoid confusion, we put little pieces of tape marking the area that we didn't want to paint.

Once you've done all of the dirty work you can start rollin'! This is where the project should fly by unless you're us. True to our nature, we always have at least one hiccup whenever we attempt a project for the first time! To save some money we decided we would just use whatever white paint we had lying around, which happened to be Behr's Satin decorator white. We were on a roll {pun intended} painting those stripes and amazed by the ease of the project...then my Dad stopped by, and I'm so happy he did. Right away he asked us what type of finish we were using to paint the stripes. Huh? I don't know the stuff we found in the basement was our reply. Unfortunately, the stuff we found in the basement was a satin finish but the green paint on the wall was a flat finish...not good! We were going to have bright, shiny white stripes and flat green stripes, oh no! Not to fret, we quickly hopped in the car and made our second Home Depot trip of the day so we could buy the correct paint! It wasn't that bad of a setback though, the stripes needed two coats so we covered the first coat with satin paint then our second coat with flat paint and it looked awesome! Lesson learned, make sure when painting stripes you use the same finish...unless you're going for more of a shiny stripe and in that case use what you have!

After you've painted the stripes {with the correct paint finish} then you just let them dry. We took the tape off after about two hours, if you'd rather wait longer to enure they're dry that's fine, too-just make sure you're using frog tape!

Once we {carefully} took the tape off it looked like this:

We waited a few more hours to really make sure the paint was dry before we hung our pictures back up and I'm so happy with the end results!

Now that the stripes are done we have more decorating goodness in store so please stay tuned! Hint: we have a furniture delivery scheduled this week!