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Update your Teen's Room with Stripes!

All right, last time we covered how to plan your decorating project with your teen. I can't promise you that there won't be any mishaps along the way, but having done this a couple of times in recent years myself, I think I can walk you through the next few steps to make the painting process as painless as possible.

Now, stripes are not a walk in the park, I will readily admit. However, with proper planning and a little patience, you and your teen can do this. Trust me. And the results? You will be transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Your teen will be the envy of all of his or her friends. Get out your armour, though, ladies, 'cuz' the other moms (and dads!) may be casting rocks your way once they have to start hearing all about it from their teens. Yep, you'll be the cool mom - at least for a few months - or weeks - or days. OK, at least for a few minutes...

Let's get started. In our case, our house is older with traditional 8 foot ceilings. We wanted to make my daughter's bedroom appear to be taller. The vertical stripes were just the ticket. However, if you are trying to achieve a more spacious look, you may want to consider horizontal stripes. Either way, stripes deceive the eye into thinking the room is a little more gracious than it truly is. Also in our case, we thought that one wall of stripes was sufficient. More than that, and it might have been overkill, not to mention double, triple or quadruple the work!

1. Start out by cleaning the walls and applying a base coat. The base coat should be the color of one of your stripes. In our case, the wall was in great shape, and one of our colors was white, so we didn't actually require a base coat. Lucky us!
2. Decide on what your pattern will be. The photo above will give you an idea of what my daughter chose. She did have a repeat, and she measured the wall very carefully to achieve her pattern. If you are planning to do evenly spaced stripes, measure the room or the area where the stripes will be painted, and calculate how to evenly space the stripes. It's a good idea to measure and paint in the least seen corner or area first. In our case, since we only did one wall and we were working with various sizes of stripes, we just started with our lightest color of stripe toward the middle of the wall and worked outward from it.
3. Use a plumb line to draw the lines on the wall in advance with plain old pencil. Mark lightly, and it the pencil will blend in with your paint. Start at the ceiling, and work your way down each stripe to the baseboard. Use some type of method to identify each color of stripe. We wrote the color lightly in pencil on each stripe.
4. Mask off the strips with low-tack painter's tape (usually the blue kind...), pressing along the outside edges of the stripes to be painted. You will paint one color at a time, allowing a minimum of several hours for the paint to dry before painting abutting stripes. It's also a good idea to mark the areas that you are not painting at this time. You could do this with an "X" of tape or a sticky note. Whatever works for you.
5. It's best to paint the lighter colors first, as you can always cover any mistakes with the darker paint later. If the stripes are wide enough, feel free to use a roller. Or, you can even purchase rollers that are smaller than average for this type of job.
6. This next step is great and one which I wish I had known about when my older and I painted her room a few years ago. After painting each color of stripes, immediately remove the tape. Using a damp paper towel, wipe away any paint that has seeped beneath the tape. This will help ensure that you keep a nice straight edge on your stripes.
7. Continue with the remaining stripes.

Voila! Beautifully painted stripes! People never stop commenting on our daughters' rooms. "This looks like something out of PB Teen!" "Who did this for you?" "How did you get those stripes so straight?" "What a darling color combination!"

What's more, both projects turned out to be nice little bonding times for me and my girls. And we're all so very proud of the results!