Stripes!

So here's what our  looong dining room wall looks like. In a word, blah. Now, our house is not very big, a bit over 1400 square feet, but this wall is over 20 feet long!

Just for reference, this is what the room looked like right before we moved in (with the previous owner's stuff).

I admit, I kind of liked what was going on with the stripes, but they had to be brought into the 21st century. The wallpaper had to go (along with the green carpet, not to mention the chandelier)! We had the wallpaper removed and the walls painted before we moved in and we were fortunate that there was hardwood underneath the carpet that we had re-finished. But we lived with those plain walls for a few years, hadn't even hung up a picture, and I said "enough is enough!" So back to those stripes...

When I had a small vacation from work, the hubby and I measured and taped and measured and taped one night for what seemed like hours (probably because it was). That is not the most fun part, but it's all in the prep! I put little dots of tape in the areas that I was not supposed to paint just so I wouldn't get mixed up at any point.

This is what it looked like after the first coat of paint. The main wall color is "Bleached Almond" by Behr and the wall was painted in an egg-shell finish. The stripes are the same color but in a semi-gloss finish. The stripes are really subtle, which you'll see in a moment, but it really adds a nice layer, without too much contrast that it would be distracting to hang pictures on.

   

And here it is all complete. As I mentioned, you can see the stripes, but they are very subtle and depending on the lighting or from what angle you look at it, sometimes they disappear.

And my favorite part - ripping down all the tape (don't forget to do it before the paint dries!!). I just want to say that we used frog tape for this project and we had absolutely no painting seeping through. No touch-ups necessary! Amazing! I highly recommend it for any job like this. So what do you think?