I’ve just purchased my first home and have spent the better part of several weekends either searching for the perfect wall color or painting walls. I see why people pay professionals to do it but you know what, I have two hands so I am going to use them.

When it came to painting my entry hallway, I was looking for something neutral and wasn’t necessarily looking to paint it all gray like I had just painted my living & dining rooms as well as the library. I have a short hallway and figured why not stripes. If vertical stripes can be used to add height to a room, way not use horizontal stripes to elongated my hallway? So of course, I set out to look at striped walls on Pinterest and went paint shopping at Home Depot, Ace Hardware and Sherwin Williams. While in Ace Hardware, I came across a Valspar paint color trio for White Space. I thought it was a nice bright, crisp and classic color trio palette. Funny thing, it still included the color gray. I intended to possibly use the three colors in my bedroom but the more  I thought about those stripes, the more I went back to those three colors.

After staring at my hallway wall for what seemed like forever, I came to the conclusion that three different colors might not be that bad and that they were very complementary to each other and it wouldn’t be such a stark contrast. So last weekend, I finally painted one side of the hallway to get a feel for the stripes and…..I love them!! It is calm, crisp and elegant and I am very happy with the results. I plan to complete the other side of the hallway soon.

There are a few tips that I would like to bestow upon my fellow weekend paint warriors that I learned along the way.

1. Use a really really good painters tape. Preferably something wider than an inch. I purchased both the blue tape by Scotch as well as the green tape by Frog tape. I would recommend the green one.
2. Plan out your lines. I had to go through several measurements to get the perfect height and amount of lines that I wanted on the wall. Put that good middle school math education into good use. My lines are 13 inches in height. The top stipe is 14 inches as I plan to add one inch crown molding. The bottom stripe is about 13.25 inches, just a little more than 13 inches but it is the bottom stripe and no one will ever notice.
3. Keep a level handy and if you have a laser level, that’s even better!
4. If you can get someone to help you, by all means, please do so! It took me forever to get these lines as straight as I could.
5. Realize that walls are NOT perfectly straight, so there will be a slight variation in parts.
6. Do not pull off your painter’s tape until your second coat has dried and be sure to pull it away from the direction of the paint (i.e. if the stripe is painted above the tape, pull the tape up).

Here are a few inspiration photos that I found & pinned while surfing through my other favorite online spot – Pinterest!

Live and Love in positivity,

Colors on wall from top to bottom:
Valspar’s Modern Gray {swatch}, Four Winds {swatch} and Warm Oatmeal {swatch}
Pictures are my own except those from Pinterest.