Bedroom #1 Progress: How to Paint Stripes

by Rissa

The time has come to start prepping my home office for paint! So exciting. I used a level tool and created straight lines throughout the room making light lines with a pencil (Since I didn’t have a leveler with a laser light, I decided it would be easier to do pencil marks before adding the frog tape).

Here are the steps I took to figure out the width of each stripe:

1. Measure the height of your wall, mine was 96 inches (8 ft)
2. Divide the height by 7 or 5 (or however many stripes you want). I feel it works easier with odd numbers. I did both, and put markers on how the walls would look with 7 stripes and how they looked with 5. I think they looked better thicker, and so did my mom and Charlie, so 5 it was.
3. 96 divided by 5 is 19.2, so each stripe should be 19.2 inches long. This is a little annoying, so I decided to do 4 stripes 19 inches long and one 20 inches. That’s easier to measure out and still adds to 96, so it works great. When I first started drawing on the lines after figuring out how wide each stripe should be, I realized the house is a little uneven. Keep in mind it’s an older house, so that’s not surprising, but I went by the leveling tool and did not try to fix this myself by making it completely perfect because then it would just look weird. No one will ever notice, because it looks perfectly straight. I feel like this could be common for those of you with older houses, so always go by the level tool.
4. Use a level tool to draw straight lines across the walls to mark where your tape will go, or just skip the pencil lines and go straight to tape if you have a laser leveler.
5. Voila! You are now ready to paint your room and have amazingly perfect striped walls!

The leveler and candy cane pencil. I think the stripes turned out better since the pencil was a candy cane design.

In this one you can see my lightly drawn pencil marks. It doesn’t really matter how dark you draw them on, paint will cover it.

After the pencil lines were drawn around the entire room, I added the frog tape. Some of the stripes may seem unequal here, but it’s just because of the tape.

Make sure you check out the next post to see how the first stripe color turned out 🙂