Raise the Roof!

When we purchased our home 10 months ago we inherited a very pink room that the previous owners' two daughters shared. It was surrounded by a border of stamped on dragon-flies and ladybugs. They spent a lot of time making it nice for the girls, but a bright pink guest bedroom just wasn't our cup of tea. The constant badgering of every friend that came to stay with us just pushed us over the edge to finally tackle it. I got some inspiration from the kids over at Young House Love with their striped powder room.

I loved the chic-ness of the stripes especially the tone-on-tone. I found out the colors that they used and decided to switch it up from horizontal to vertical stripes. I also wanted to accent the main wall that you see when you walk into the room, which is the wall the bed was centered on. Ben and I took a three day weekend to tackle this project. Here's how it went down:

1. Paint the entire room with the darker tone ( since I wanted the warmer of the two tones surrounding the room). From my limited experience, if you are changing the tone completely it will take two coats to cover, along with primer.

2. Pick the thickness of the stripes. I decided that I wanted large stripes so I went with 10"

3. Bust out the good ol' tape measure and make three marks every 10" at the bottom, middle, and top of the wall.

4. Start tapin'. I put a big X where we were going to be painting and put the tape on the outside of the lines surrounding the "soon to be stripe"

5. Get to painting! Start painting the lighter color over the section marked with the X. It might take two coats to get rid of brush strokes.

And there you have it! A really cool accent wall that's not too much in your face. PS. It is SO true what they say about vertical stripe making you look tall. I feel like the room just got 10 foot ceilings! Well that's a little exaggerated, but we did just raise the roof in that room. What do you guys think?