Tips for Painting Horizontal Lines

Stripes, no matter which direction, can add style to a boring plain wall. Whether you want tone on tone color or a dramatic contrast of color, stripes can be stunning on your walls. Horizontal lines can give a room a contemporary feel and depending on width of stripes can make a room appear larger. The wider the stripes the larger the room feels. It may seem that you need a professional to do your stripes but you can actually do it yourself with little difficulty. The main thing is to make sure each line is perfectly straight and horizontal.

Items Needed:

* Roller brush or small paint brush (depending on how wide your stripe will be)
* Large roll of painter’s tape
* Tape Measure
* Paper to Cover floor areas
* Pencil
* A Level

Before you start prepping to paint you need to decide where you want the stripes to be. How high do you want the stripes to start and how wide do you want it to be? Once you have this figured out you can start marking your points. You want to start from the floor and using your tape measure, measure up to the point where you want the stripe to start. Mark this with a pencil. Do this every few feet around the wall until you have your whole area marked out.

Next, following your pencil marks around the wall using your tape, the tape will go below the pencil marks. You will need to make sure this line of tape is straight. You can use your level to make sure your lines are going up perfectly horizontal. The tape is for protecting the wall you don’t want painted and it will give you neat crisp edges.

Now you need to make your top line for your horizontal stripe. Once you decide how thick you want your stripe to be you can do just as you did previously, measuring from floor up and marking the way around the wall then taping off. Remember this time the tape will go above your pencil marks. Use your hand to go along tape smoothing it down to make sure there are no air bubbles that paint could run in and mess up your crisp lines.

Once everything is completely taped off you can start painting. Lay out your protective paper to cover your floors. If your stripes are wide you can use a roller brush, if they are skinny you will need to use a small paintbrush to paint your stripes.

Painting horizontal lines can be an easy project you can do to add interest to your room. Take to the time to do your prep work properly and you will have beautifully professional stripes on your wall.