What makes a fun accent wall? Well stripes of course!!!

I knew I wanted to do a wall of stripes and decided our fireplace wall was begging to be the chosen wall who gets to wear this awesome feature.

This was how the wall started out.  Not the worst thing I'd ever seen
but even though red is actually my favorite color (I even painted
my room red when I was a teenager) it just isn't my style.
Plus, I love decorating, of course I'm repainting everything!

We gave it a nice coat of Valspar's interior latex primer
(getting those edges can be tricky, but just go in with a big
brush and a steady hand to get a nice crisp line) I liked it better already :)

I wanted an odd number of stripes. 5 stripes seemed like
they would be too big and 9 felt to busy to me so 7 was the magic number.
We measured the wall top to bottom, divided it by 7 then marked
out the lines with paint in about  1ft. increments.  During this step
you'll probably get comments like "Are you sure you're doing this right?"
and that's because you dont have to be as careful during this
step and we made the lighter stripes a little wider than needed in order to do the next part...

We got out our handy dandy lazer level and taped away! (Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of this step because my camera seems to have deleted it. Picture this wall with green tape and both colors painted on) We laid the tape on top of the light color, so our messy edges were ready to be painted over with our darker blue. When you're doing a project like this you want your lines to be PERFECT, so paint bleeding through is a concern. Ready for a great TIP?! Here it is!! ***Get all your tape on the wall. Then BEFORE you start painting your second (darker) color -take a brush and seal the side of the tape your are about to paint with the SAME (lighter) color that is already on the wall. That way if anything bleeds through, it's of the same color, so it doesn't actually ruin the line. *ALSO make sure you peel your tape off while the paint is still wet!

I just love this wall now. That moment is always a little nerve wracking
when you pull the first strip of tape and hope that you don't find a
blotchy mess of smeary lines. I'm happy to say that with the exception
of probably 2 tiny little touch ups, our lines turned out PERFECT!
 (Thank you Frog Tape!) Now I'm keeping my eye open for the perfect
mirror to put in that empty spot! One of these days
I'm gonna paint that fireplace too... cream I think :)

Colors I used were Behr's Blue Fox (the darker blue) and Behr's Cloudy day (lighter blue). In a Satin finish.

Blue Stripes and Frog Tape,

Steph