"Oops"! We Painted Stripes!

I have to be honest. I have sort of a haphazard approach to designing the spaces in our house. I rarely have a well laid out plan. Although I find inspiration everywhere, the beginnings of the rooms often start in the "oops" paint section(cans of paint that have been mixed and were returned for whatever reason, ie, mis-tint, customer chickened out...) of the home improvement store. This paint is marked down from about $20-25 or more for a full gallon to 5 bucks! A quart that is normally $13 will be marked down to $2.50. And for a person like me, who is likely to spend upwards of an hour  pouring over the dreamy display of paint samples, to pick out, oh about, 10; take them home, tape 'em up on the walls and shortly change my mind about every single last one of them, having a ready-mixed shade, just waiting for my "yay" or "nay" AND is 75% off--- that's the ticket for me, sister!

The drawbacks to this method of paint selection is fairly obvious. What if you've decided on a color and it's not magically waiting for you in the "oops" section? Well, then, just buy a regular can and have it mixed! Stick with your plan! But if you don't have a plan, (like me) it's a lot of fun hunting down pretty shades that will surprise and delight you, and even take you out of your design box. For example, my home's palate started off with grays and whites accented with turquiose. DD (my darling husband, Dan) and I were ready to paint the downstairs powder room a medium-light gray. While I was out picking up some painting supplies, I stopped by my favorite section, and to my surprise and delight, a perfect can of semi-gloss BLACK was calling me over. Black? Pure black, you say? Yep. Black. Pure black. And for 5 bucks! Why not? It was the really good kind with paint and primer in one. So I bought it, and as I drove home, I plotted out how I was going to convince my hubby that a black powder room would be a great idea!!

But this post isn't about the black powder room. (Which I love, but isn't finished, so I'll post about that later.) This post is about the upstairs hallway, which I also love. For a while now, I've been thinking that the house could use a little more color, a little more in the way of fun. It's starting to feel a little too serious. I've been lusting over striped walls and thought that would be just the thing to liven up the hallway and be a perfect backdrop for my family gallery wall. So, I got out my paint collection and chose my colors.


"reduced", my favorite word!

 And made a plan. I just chose the colors that I wanted to use and mocked up some stripes in a word document, got out the painter's tape, and got to it!!




the "before"



I must say, painting stripes is time consuming because, unless you are leaving the space where the tape was blank, you have to wait till your first stripe dries before retaping and painting the stripe next to it. So for this one wall, it pretty much took us all day to plan, tape and paint. I think it's totally worth it, don't you? and I (meaning DD) changed out the super plain light fixtures to these super cute vintage looking semi-flush pendants. (One of the few items that I bought full price.) 

First stripe goes up! (And one light fixture as it dries)



And then we added the blue...

At this point, I considered leaving it. I thought it was very pretty as is. But then I realized that I was just being chicken and a little lazy. (Just this took about two hours...) My plan was to give the house personality and energy.....So I went for the GUSTO! And ended up with....

THIS!! Do you like it?

Stay tuned for the installation of the family picture gallery going up on this wall. It's great....And I put it together BY MYSELF!! Yep, I used the drill and everything. Can't wait to show you!