New York Interior Design: Striped Ceiling

I've been struggling with how to give you a 'how-to' on the striping of the bathroom ceiling. So this may be more of a 'how-not-to'! Don't get me wrong, it turned out great but it was quite a process! Striping a ceiling is not like doing it on a wall. I've done the wall thing before, and I don't mean to minimize the work involved there but this was a different animal.

I started out by choosing the right side of the room and from the wall measured out 8 inches on each side all the way across the room to the left. There are lots of ways to do this but I chose this method. Again starting out on the right side I used my frog tape and taped from one mark across to the corresponding mark on the other side.

I left my ceiling the original white and just added my gray stripes on top. For each gray stripe the tape would go on the outside of my marks. So as you go across the ceiling you would put your tape outside the marks for each stripe. To avoid making painting mistakes I put a piece of my tape each place I should paint a stripe. Believe me, when you are staring at all that ceiling and tape it is easy to put paint in the wrong places.

The first thing I learned about painting a ceiling is that you need a steady ladder! My was not! When you are looking up, holding a paint brush and balancing a paint tray your center of balance is poor and accidents may happen! {Imagine my horror when from my perch the whole paint tray flipped over and flew to the ground! Oh yes, quite a mess!}

Let me go back to the taping! It looks way easier than it was! You can't really use a level on the ceiling and to get your tape perfectly straight took lots of retries! I finally banned my husband from the bathroom because he could see all the wobbles in my lines! I finally decided that perfection was not to be achieved and just did the best I could, thinking that I could touch up with paint later if I needed too.

I really shouldn't have stressed about it so much. Once I painted it all and pulled the tape {I pulled the tape off while it was still wet because I didn't want to risk ruining my lines}, I couldn't even see the imperfections. Let me rephrase that, as long as you don't lay on the bathroom floor looking up, you don't see the imperfections!

I did have a few spots of gray that I accidentally got on the white and one spot where the tape pulled off some of the white paint underneath. I didn't have any ceiling paint on hand and didn't want to have to go out and buy any. My genius friend, Suzette, came up with a simple solution. She suggested using just white craft acrylic paint. It worked perfectly!!

If you want to see the whole reveal check it out here.

So if you are looking for the perfect tutorial on how to stripe a ceiling, keep on looking! I am so happy with the end result but it was a lot more stress that I anticipated. {Part of that stress is just in stepping outside of my comfort zone and doing something crazy like striping a ceiling. Who does that?!?}

Don't mind the bad picture, but here is an old one of what this bathroom looked like a while ago. Much better now, huh? Its amazing what even painting that wood did for the space.