Laura's room

I am finally getting brave enough to hook up my camera and try to download a few more pictures. Here are some pictures of the process of redoing Lulu's room, which she did over Christmas vacation.

Before the project, her room was baby blue on the bottom and creamery yellow on the top with a very sweet border around the middle at chair-rail height. The border was of little girls all dressed up in a blooming English garden, serving a tea party to their teddy bears. I guess it's wonder that she put up with it until she was 15. It was pretty, though. She was so thrilled when we first did it for her back when she was four.


She started the new project by painting her room white. Shawn helped her. They primed and then they painted.

After painting the white base coat, it was time to apply the yellow stripes. Fortuitously, the walls were all basically "on the foot" and she wanted six inch stripes, so we just started by measuring 3 inches in from each corner and making six inch stripes from there to the other end, which left approximately three inches of white at the end of each wall, which when added together in the corners made six inches of white in each corner. It came out very nicely.

Here is the tape:

If you look closely, you can see that Laura sealed the tape with a swipe of white paint before she filled in the stripes with yellow paint. This was to prevent the yellow paint from bleeding under the edge of the tape.

Here you can see Laura painting in a yellow stripe between the taped lines. (BTW it took forever to measure and tape; she used a level to get them straight.)

We found that it was VERY important to get the tape off while the yellow paint was still wet. So Shannon became the tape remover. Laura painted and Shannon took down tape. What a great big sister!

Here, Shannon holds up the paint tray so Laura can load up her brush and do the edgework by the window.

This is a finished wall. Didn't they do a great job? Laura says that her math teacher painted stripes in her daughter's room, and her daughter got sick of them and wanted them changed the next year. Laura told her, "Make her do her own room. Then she will never want to do it again and she will live with it forever." That's Laura's current plan for her room.

You can see how it turned out in the photo at the end of this post.