DIY: No Paint Striped Walls

One my inspiration pictures for my sister's new-ish apt was this striped wonder from Country Living.



I knew that the key to my look would have to be the striped walls. Since she is renting the apartment I knew that we couldn't really paint or wallpaper. I knew that some people had added stripes with floral/Japenese tape, but both of those options were not the right color or width. I toyed with the idea of ribbon, but wasn't sure how straight it would come out so I searched for an idea.

After a little thinking the idea came to me!



Electrical tape was the perfect fix. It was the color I wanted and would be easy to apply and remove. Plus after a trial run in my own home I was certain that it wouldn't ruin the paint job underneath the tape.

I wanted something wider than the traditional electrical tape that you can find at your local home improvement store so I did a quick search online and found out I could order 2" on Amazon.

Now in order to figure out how many stripes you can do on you wall you need to figure out how long your walls are.

For example if your walls are 8 ft tall and the roll of electrical tape is 60 ft then divide 60 into 8 and you will see that you can get 7.5 stripes on your wall. I would round down to 7.


*You should totally do this before measuring. I only ordered 2 rolls because 60 ft per roll sounded like a lot, but in the end I would have liked more lines. So I'm going to order more...just don't tell Jon yet. :)

Now start on one side of the wall and slowly go down the wall:



After a couple of rows we realized that the best way to get the tape on properly was to stick the tape up where you want to start from and then loosen the tape from the roll for the entire length of the wall. Once it loose slowly start pressing it onto the wall about 6 inches at a time so you don't get any bubbles.



To get a clean line at the bottom we simply used a razor blade to make the cut.

After the first piece is down you now want to go to the opposite side (aka the place on the wall where your last stripe is going to be) and apply the tape.

Now that you have your first stripe and your last stripe you need to do the middle stripe.



To figure out the middle here is what you do:

Let's say the open distance between the first stripe and your last stripe is 5 1/2" "half of that is 2 3/4" making that your center line. Since our tape was 2" wide we wanted the center of the tape to be at the 2 3/4" mark. Because the tape is not clear you won't be able to see your center line while applying the tape. Since the tape is 2" wide the center line of the tape is 1". Therefore if you add 1" to your center line you can run the edge of the tape down a marked line that you can see. Sounds confusing, but once you're doing it (or aka having Jon do it because you are laying on sofa watching Troy :) ) you realize it's not that. (Don't worry I did help I just sat for a couple of mins.)

Jon made a little diagram to show how it should look:



Make a small mark where your middle stripe is going to go:


You want your stripe to be straight so much sure your make marks every couple of inches on the length of the wall:

Up:


and down he went:



Apply middle stripe:



To fill the wall you just need to continue doing the steps above and after a little bit of time you will have something like this:



If you make a mistake you can easily peel it right off.



Like I mentioned before the tape in my experience will not damage any of the paint on the wall. It comes off clean.



At this point you'll probably be feeling a bit nutty. Jon decided to use some tape and act silly:



Once your stripes are up you can hang up your artwork.



The room is only about 7 ft wide so it's hard to take pictures. I tried another angle to get more of the gallery wall:



I reused pieces from their old apt so the whole project only cost around $10!

Close up of one section:




Room shot: