Stripe Attack

When it comes to painting my boys' rooms, I don't like to take the easy route, no I like to outline some crazy ambitious plan and make myself pay for it. So, when I decided to take a day off to paint a room, I think some folks were skeptical. "Does she really need three days to paint a room?" The simple answer: yes.

K's room was beige. And not a pretty Martha Stewart neutral palette beige ... but a dated, yellow, icky beige. We just hadn't gotten around to painting the room because life was a constant on the move thing ... and well, K is only in his room to sleep. (We're those crazy kind of parents who won't let our children have TVs in their room.)

So, I declared that we would in fact paint K's room before he started kindergarten. It was essential for my son to have a room that felt like his place, not some cast-off leftover of the previous owners (who took their realtor's advice to paint half the interior rooms with that horrible semi-gloss beige paint.)

Day 1 found us spackling, sanding, cleaning and taping walls. I was lucky enough to get a first coat of the base color on the walls before it was too late in the evening. The second day, I put on the second coat of base color and then after what felt like adequate drying time, I taped up the first layer of stripes. It looked something like this:

There is something very cathartic about meticulously measuring out stripes and then leveling them out to make sure they are straight, and applying the tape across. Of course, I also had to have a very specific pattern - so the darker stripe is half the width of the lighter stripe. I was crazy, I stayed up until 1 a.m. carefully applying the paint and making sure I got it "just so." Because I had the windows open, I was entertained by our neighbor's kid who was having her last hurrah before going off to college, as she sat there and reminisced with her friends. When I saw how late it was when I had finished the darker blue stripe ... I couldn't believe myself.

But doing just two colors wouldn't have been enough of a challenge. I like things in three. O has three colors on his wall, so I needed to give K the same type of balance. So, on the third day ... I applied the smaller stripe, a beautiful chocolate brown that broke up the two blues. After three long days ... this is what I had to show for it:

A view of the door way, which I also decided to accent by painting in the darker blue.

A view from the other side of the room, at an angle. Now we do need to look for new window treatments to go with the room.

At the end of the day, K says he loves it ... which is what matters most to me. However, I wonder if he really loves it, or if he loved the fact that he got to have a slumber part for four nights because he couldn't sleep in his room!