Stripes Galore

Last week was nice.  Quiet.  Nonstressful.  All mine.  

Ahhhhh.

My parents had all four of my kids for a whole week.  I didn't even have to ask them to do that!  It was a last minute plan, so my husband and I didn't have time to plan anything.  (Last time this happened, we headed to Playa del Carmen, Mexico!  "All four kids are gone?  Adios, amigos!")

So, instead, I decided to make the most of my week and crank out a bunch of projects I've been wanting to do.  On my time, with no snack and lunch breaks due to constant nagging.  No breaking up arguments over the computer/TV/Wii/whatever.  My time.  All mine.

First up... my son's bedroom.

I gave up on making it look like the magazines or the cool blogs out there.  No matter how organized I tried to make his room;  no matter how many bins or drawers or baskets;  his room is always cluttered.  He's nine.  He doesn't want a Pottery Barn look-alike for a room.  He loves to display his Lego finds, and trophies, and cool cars, and awards, and stuffed animals, and Star Wars figures, and rocks, and erasers, and ... 

And well, it's cluttered.  Always.  No changing that till puberty at least (if we're lucky).

So, instead of worrying anymore about that, I decided to make at least one wall fun and "finished".  

This is a before shot of his room.  It's light green on the walls, with blue quilt and furniture.  There's a mild Star Wars theme to the room.  As you can see from the photo, we've moved his bed, and hadn't yet adjusted the poster to fit OVER the bed again.  LOL  I'm quite OCD, so this has bugged me for months now.

So, thus began the striping.  If you look to the right of the above picture, you can see the laser line of my laser level.  I had to do this 22 times to make 11 stripes.  But I can see no other way of doing this.  Just line up the tape with the red line.

Here's the painter's tape on the wall.  I did this the night before painting.  Just so I didn't have to kill my knees with so much ladder-climbing all at once.  It's nice to wake up on painting-morning, with all the taping done.  This little step took a few hours...

and two and a half rolls of tape!

While at Home Depot the other day, I stumbled across a few of the $2 quarts Oops paints in cool "boy colors"... brown, reddish-brown, and dark yellow.  I already had some leftover navy blue, so I was happy to have a CHEAP assortment.  What colors I used weren't as important as just making sure they were masculine and went well together.

As you can see from the above photo, I'm a sloppy painter... I just work around whatever is there... Legos on the desk.  Yeah... just leave 'em.  I do use a drop cloth always... but it may be heaped over toys in the way.  I hate cleaning up ahead of time... I spend my time on the clean up AFTER, making it all look good.

I did have my husband help me move the heavy captain's bed, and started to work.  There was no planning to this.  I made various heights of stripes, and as I taped, I wrote in pencil what colors I envisioned there.  I just made sure that it wasn't a repeated pattern and that no two colors came in a row.

 This is after the navy blue and brown.

Here, the colors are done.  Just waiting to dry.

Now, I forgot to mention that I KNOW a proper way to stripe.  I *should* paint the light green or clear across the tape edges first to make sure that nothing bled under the tape.  However, I didn't have much green left at all, and quite truthfully, I was being lazy and didn't want to postpone this project any longer.

So, inevitably... this happened.

Fortunately it wasn't bad, and I touched up the few areas that stood out.  If I were to do it over, I'd make sure I had the green paint to do the first layer.  Just saves a lot of heartache even if it does mean another run to the Home Depot 30 minutes away.  

One thing learned though... FrogTape works better than the old Scotch blue.  I ran out of blue toward the top of the wall with tape... so I switched to Frog Tape.... no runs there!!  I'll be sticking with Frog Tape from now on.

Here's the final project.  The rest of the room isn't as neat as I'd like, but it's a lost cause.  

Fortunately it went over well.   He loved the stripes!  No need for a headboard when you have this.