You remember yesterday, yes? I decided to paint vertical stripes in our front door entry area. Normally I'm not big into doing stripes for myself (which probably seems odd since all I've posted photos of lately are stripes I've designed) but only because I know what it takes to paint over them. Probably how people feel about removing wallpaper. When you paint a stripe, it leaves an ever so slight change in plane, an edge, which is a huge hassle to remove if you want to paint over the whole wall. It never goes away, that line.
So yeah, I'm taking a big leap in my own house, doing something I hate covering over: stripes.
Yesterday I drew up a few options for stripe widths on the 'pooter. Did some sanding.
Today I did some refilling of holes touch up and then more sanding. Then ripped out the palm sander to try and erase the dark red edge line so there isn't a nasty horizontal line going through my finely finished paint job. Not easy, heh! I pulled out that crappy white paint and used that as a sort of primer so that I don't have to battle the colors underneath and the stripes will be true to color.
No doubt there are a bazillion how-to's on how to paint stripes but just don't forget that when you put your tape up, give it a good scrape down on the painted side to prevent leaks. And then brush some paint or sealer or whatever into the tape edge to seal it up further. Leaks bad.
Much much better so far. Just the white alone made a huge difference to this little corner of the house. (Is it me or does that newel post all of a sudden not look straight? Ugh....)
Which leads me to Abigail Ahern's blog. Omg, I know, sorry. I'm not sure why I'm so hell bent on her lately. Probably because I simply just cannot fill my eyes enough with her images. I didn't realize she had a blog so I thought, hey, I should probably check it out. And her post from March 24 hit the nail on the head, why I'm putting in so much effort to make things nicer around here (aside from the fact that the flipper had ridiculously dreadful taste).
I poked around a bit and saw this post of hers that reminded me of my post about design rules and thought, this woman knows of what she speaks. I liked that she was more lax about them, "guidelines" instead of "rules." And that she was positive rather than most of those rules articles or do's and don'ts lists out there which are usually so steadfast, rigid, and negative.
This stuff is supposed to be fun, people. Not torture, or tortured. It's meant to improve your life and your surroundings so you're happier. I think that's what a lot of people don't get, why they don't trust designers or think design is voodoo or a useless, value-less expense -- the point is missed: design is good, design does good, design adds tangible and intangible value that is priceless.
I got just that tape line up on the wall earlier today, stepped back, visualized the stripes in my head, and instantly felt happy and excited. Niiice.
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