Redesign Videos

Tutorial

I’ve been dreaming of a fun, bold striped room for my 6-year-old son, and this challenge was the perfect time to finally knock it out! This project was quick and easy to complete (it only took one day to do all of the painting!) and he’s thrilled with how it looks now!

How to Paint a Striped Wall

• Start by determining the size of your stripes. I wanted 5 large stripes, and I wanted to leave a small strip of the original wall color between each stripe. I measured the height of the wall, then I took the width of my Frog Tape (1.4 inches) and multiplied it by 4 (for the space between each stripe) to get 5.6”. I subtracted that from the total height of my wall and divided by 5 to get the size each stripe needs to be!
• Tape off the stripes. Once you’ve determined how large each stripe should be, you’re ready to tape. I used Frog Tape Multi-Surface Painter’s Tape to tape off the lines for this project. If you have a laser level, that’s a really easy way to get a straight line - mine wasn’t working, so I simply marked the spacing at multiple points along the wall, then made sure the tape hit each point and stayed straight. I also taped off the corners where the wall would be staying white.
• Seal the tape with the base color. We have textured walls, and that means that it can be really challenging to get nice, crisp lines. Thankfully, I can always trust Frog Tape to give me really clean results. If you want to make absolutely sure you don’t have any bleed-through (which is almost inevitable when you have heavily textured walls), I find that the best method is to paint over the tape with a layer of the original wall color. This helps seal the paint a little bit, and any bleed-through is the base color! Allow that to dry, and then you’re ready for the fun part!
• Paint your stripes. Once your “sealing coat” is done, you can grab the fun colors and go to town. I mocked up my stripes on the computer before I put anything on the wall so I could see how they’d work together before I did any painting. I found it really helpful to use some Frog Tape Drop Cloth Pads to help protect the floor while I was doing this part - the small size was perfect since I was moving so quickly around the room, and I love that they’re leak-proof and won’t seep through if you drip a bit of paint!
• Remove your tape before the paint dries. As soon as you finish painting, it’s time to pull off the tape! If you allow it to dry fully before removing the tape, you may end up pulling up some of the paint with it and having to do touch ups. For best results, you should pull up the tape while the paint is still slightly wet - and you’ll get those beautiful, crisp, perfect lines every time!

And that, my friends, is all there is to it! From set-up to pulling off the tape just took me one afternoon, and it completely and utterly changed the feel of his entire room! I’d say it was an afternoon well spent, wouldn’t you?!