Not-Quite-Naptime Project: Painting Stripes.

I bet you're dying to know where I was going to put my stripes.

Well, I won't even beat about the bush. They're in the stairwell, hopefully to progress to the foyer and upstairs hall. We're going for gusto here, kids.

See, although the gray paint is/was SO MUCH BETTER than that awful green we had before, it'd slowly kind of become ... meh. There wasn't much exciting about it other than it's wasn't green, and without having the budget in the foreseeable future for the wallpaper I want, I decided to just take matters into my own hands.

The stairwell was easy because it was accessible without a ladder and had obvious start and stop places -- at least the side where we built the storage wall. And since the paint we used when we went to gray had that stain-blocking primer in it, we only used one gallon instead of the two we had laying around, so if I hated it, I could easily repaint it and pretend it never happened.

Being able to cover your tracks is key.

The thing I knew I needed to get right, if my stripes weren't going to look a hot effing mess, was measuring. I needed to decide how wide I wanted my stripes, at what kind of ratio, and how they'd fit onto that space, which admittedly is more than a little awkward. So I bust out my Ariel pencil and made a lot of crazy marks on my wall at weird intervals because I was going up the stairs as I measured and I didn't really think that out very well.

A close-up of the crazy marks, because lead on gray is about as easy to photograph as a rainbow. Or an all-black bedroom. Ahem.

I managed to get the spacing pretty much dead on, at three-inch even intervals, at the bottom of the stairs:

I had to play with the spacing at the bottom a little bit, but I quickly left it alone because I was at the point of needed assistance at the bottom, so I moved to the top of the stairs where it was MUCH easier for me to reach:

And I learned that because the walls aren't completely flat and even, I had to allow myself about an 1/8 of an inch of wiggle room to make sure the stripes looked straight even though they might kind of not be. Optical illusion of being on the stairs, I guess. 

I had to leave it like this for a couple of days (because I used an entire roll of Frog Tape with only three and a half stripes to go, OF COURSE) but I eventually got Kyle to help me with the tallest parts over the side of the storage wall, and the stripes were laid out:

It was at this point that Kyle softly plead with me to leave it for a few days to see how we liked it just taped out. I was mostly thinking that I didn't go through a roll and a half of Frog Tape (which isn't cheap) to have him veto it in the ninth hour, but I had to give it to him that he helped me tape some of it and he needs more time to adjust to change than I do.

I oddly grew attached to the green-on-gray combo, but there was NO WAY I was going to paint those walls any shade of green again. Plus, in the greater scope of the house colorways, green isn't awesome, and since this space is kind of the unifying one, it has to go.

I also kind of promised Kyle I'd only use paint we already had, so that kind of limited my options.

So, we waited, and I debated what color to fill in the gaps. You probably can guess, but I'm going to make you wait until Tuesday for confirmation. :)