Painting NM’s room

Posted on | December 4, 2008 | No Comments


2008-11-19 Painting NM’s Room – DONE
Originally uploaded by Phisch

Ta-dah! And we have stripes. I think that the spacing and width is probably not exactly Adidas, but it’s ok, it’s working for me.

The white is amazing and it looks so much better than it used to in the room. Now we just have to finish working on the software—fabrics—so that everything ties nicely together.

Actually, before that, we’re going to paint J’s walls since he wants them done very badly. Just like his brother’s, only green. I’m still trying to convince him to let me paint faux trees on his walls and put a tent on his bed so we can make it look like a camp site. So far, he’s unconvinced.

EDIT: I forgot the real point to this post was to share the way to get the stripes absolutely perfect, or nearly so.

First we painted the lighter color and let it overlap the area where the darker colored stripes would be.

Then, we marked off the area where the blue would meet the white using a straight edge with a built-in level.

Right above the newly penciled line, we masked off with a one-inch wide strip of painter’s tape. We should have used low-tack tape!

Immediately above that strip of tape, we put another of the same width, leaving no gaps at all. We put in another five strips of one-inch tape and removed every other one. We then had a mask with even widths for everything without having to mark out all the lines with a level each time. It only took two rolls of tape, and not even much of the second roll.

Now, the magic: over all the edges of the tape except the top- and bottom-most edges, we painted the white that we used for the top of the room. There’s no way to avoid paint seeping under the masking, so it might as well be the right color. The tape got “sealed” and we avoided getting the blue paint where we didn’t want it.

The best part would have been peeling away all the tape except that, barring a few extra splotches of blue that were easy to fix, we had a lot of the paint come off when we pulled the tape. Hence, the advice to use low-tack tape.

Category: crafting, interiors
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