Bedroom Progress: Chevron Striped Wall

Am I the only one who starts a project with an exact idea of what they want, and then changes their mind at the last minute and does something completely different? As regular readers know I am currently decorating my boys’ bedrooms. My eldest son, being 7, was given some choice in the matter and requested a grey bedroom with a painted feature wall and a gallery of frames where he could display his own artwork, (he has clearly inherited my taste!)

So there I was, planning to paint a grey room with a grey and white striped feature wall. Just plain old horizontal stripes. But then I hit Pinterest and started coming across pictures like this:

Source: Buttons, Birds and BS blog.

And I instantly fell in love with the chevron pattern! So this is how I’ve spent every spare minute of last week...

The room has just been newly plastered, so I started by painting the woodwork, the ceiling and the walls. Three were painted grey and one – the one I’d earmarked as being the feature wall – was painted white.

When it came to taping the chevron pattern I briefly considered buying Frog Tape (a professional painter’s tape) but I’d read bad reviews about it taking chunks out of new plaster, so in the end I opted for regular masking tape. The first thing I did was figure out how many vertical strips of tape I needed – fortunately when I measured the room it was exactly 12 foot wide which made the logical distance between each strip a nice and simple 3 foot. Physically putting the strips up was a little challenging as our 1930s house has high ceilings. I wasn’t too precious about measuring if the lines were exactly parallel as our house is built slightly wonky anyway, and things tend to look better if I do them by eye rather than relying on tape measures.

To do the horizontal zig zags I used a metre stick to mark lines at 14 inch intervals from floor to ceiling on every length of tape then sort of played "join the dots" with strips of masking tape, which was kinda fun. I plucked the “14 inches” out of thin air and it serendipitously turned out that the ceiling height was exactly divisible by that number; if only the rest of the project had worked out so well.

To stop the grey paint bleeding underneath the tape I painted the edges with white paint first and left it to dry. It’s a technique I’ve used in the past and it always works for me.

Next I used a small roller to fill in all the areas I wanted grey. 

But I was dreading the next bit... removing the masking tape. After leaving the grey paint to dry for 24 hours I carefully peeled it all away, and most of it left beautiful, neat straight lines like this:

But I was having one of those days when nothing goes right and a few areas looked more like this:

For some reason, that darn tape really put up a fight along the outside edges of the wall and took huge chunks of the paint with it. I’d mentally prepared myself for having to do a bit of patch up work, but it was a little lot dispiriting to have to devote yet another day to patching up the messy paintwork.

If you stand up real close you can still see which areas were damaged because they aren't as perfect as the rest of the wall, but since the paint damage was mostly contained to around the edges it isn’t too noticeable overall and I’m still really pleased with how it looks:

Despite the fact it took a fair bit of effort and there were a few expletives used when it was all going wrong, I would do it all again! I’m taking a short break from decorating this bedroom now because I need to get littlest boy’s room painted before his new bed is delivered, but when I return to this bedroom in a couple of weeks my to do list looks like this:

·         Buy wardrobe

·         Buy new bedding

·         Take a trip to Ikea and stock up on frames for creating a gallery way.

·         Convert cupboard (currently being used as a wardrobe) into desk area.

I’m  hoping to post the big reveals for both boys’ bedroom before the end of November (but no one remind me I said that if that estimate turns out to be wildly over ambitious!)

***edit*** Just a quick shout out about the Fall Pinterest Challenge which I'm linking this post up to. You can join in through any of these blogs: Young House Love Bower Power Our Fifth House The Ugly Duckling House