How to Paint a Striped Wall and a Painters Tape Comparison

We are working on making a big boy room for Garrett. Last week I showed you how to

Today I am going to show you 

Before you stripe I recommend painting your room and then waiting at least 24 hours before you stripe to let your base coat dry enough.There are 2 ways you can do this, one is with a laser level as you see below. The other is by measuring down from your ceiling with a yardstick. As you can see here I used a laser level and put the tape along the line. The good thing with laser level is that you can see the laser going around a corner. I am using frog tape below and I will show you later why it's the best.

I left 6 inches between the tape lines. Before you start painting take your hand or a plastic scraper and run it along the tape to make sure it is down good.

Once you are ready to start painting you paint horizontal along your tape lines this will help seal the tape line to prevent dripping. Just ignore the fact that I bought the wrong size roller but it worked anyway.

Then go up and down between the lines. It took me 2 coats to get the color solid. I used Valspar Paint and Primer in one from Lowe's, it's Low oder and no VOC's. I loved this paint, I used to be paint snob and would only use Benjamin Moore but I have to say I liked this just as much.

When you are done pull the tape off immediately do not wait for the paint to dry. To prevent more drips you need to pull the tape toward the paint line as shown below.

I also wanted to paint a smaller line of dark grey on top to tie it in with the fan. For this I decided to use Scotch Brand tape with Edge lock because of the width and because I could not find the frog tape in the right width. It allowed me to just tape along the top of the red stripe using it as a guide instead of using the laser level. 

at this point for some reason my laser level would not stick to the wall so I took a good old fashioned ruler and made tick marks with a pencil about every 1 1/2 - 2 feet to make the top tape line. My red stripe was 6 Inches the dark grey line was 1 1/2".

then took my tape and connected the dots if you will. Again, make sure you go along your tape lines to press them down good and use the same paint procedure as above. Now here is the comparison for you and the reason I will only use Frog Tape in the future!

Unbelievable the difference in these tapes. I wish they would start making other sizes and if they do tell me where to find them I can only find the big width! I had to go along with a small paintbrush and touch up the dark grey lines, luckily I have a steady hand to do so which was more than frustrating. I can declare, Frog Tape is the clear winner!

So here is how the stripes turned out, later this week I will be sharing some other things I did before the big room reveal. I promise those pics will be better, it rained for 3 days while I was working on the room so it was rather dark when I took the pics.

If you would like to see the final room reveal go here!