How to: Paint Stripes

This is what our "office" looked like when we bought our house in 2009:
I have wondered many times why the former owners chose such a dark color. Especially when I was painting the roughly 40' tall stairwell... So, it looks really small, right? This room has to wear many hats: an office while my husband was in graduate school, an office for me since I work from home, and a guest bedroom whenever we have company. Initially, we left the color like this and added two desks, a bookcase, and a futon. That just didn't work. The room was so crowded with furniture that it was stressful just to be in there.

Then, I decided to get rid of the futon. We only have overnight guests a handful of times per year-- an air mattress would suffice. I decided to rearrange furniture, replace the wobbly ceiling fan with a bright overhead light, paint, and add chair molding.

This is what it looks like now:

Since taking this picture, I have added a cream sheer, side-swept panel curtain to the window. It was definitely the finishing touch the window needed! Aaron and I stained the desks, which we got unfinished from the Wooden Chair near our house.

And you can see my dog, Maddie, to the left. =)

To me, the whole room looks larger, brighter, and cleaner! This is because of the visual interest created by stripes on the lower portion of the wall.

Here's how I created the stripes:

1.) Paint your main wall color from ceiling to baseboard.

2.) Decide how high you want your chair rail. A chair rail, once installed, should be 30-36 inches from the floor.

3.) Decide how thick you want your stripes. Keep in mind, skinny stripes may look busy and chunky stripes may look bottom heavy. Mine are 10 inches each. To do this, I used a yardstick, a level, and a pencil to mark lines every 10 inches around the room. Then, I drew an X in every other stripe. Finally, I taped INSIDE the lines of the lighter color. Once it was taped, there were 10 open inches in the "to be painted dark" sections, and less space showing between the tape of the main color sections. Once the tape was removed, every stripe was a perfect 10 inches.

4.) Choose your colors. I chose colors from the same swatch, one about three shades darker than the main wall color. Since we will keep this room painted like this until we sell our house, I chose neutral colors. Why paint twice? =)

5.) Choose a good paint! I prefer Behr Premium Plus Ultra (paint & primer in one). It's a little more pricy, but it's generally 1 coat coverage, nice thick paint. Comparably priced is Sherwin Williams. However, I have found Sherwin Williams paints to be runny and splatter a lot. The better your paint, the less physical work you'll have to put into painting.

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