ZIGZAG paint project for my boys room

I have been doing a lot of painting recently and my last 2 projects have yielded some good results.  I was asked to document the process for the most recent paint project so here it is!

My first accent wall project for my girl

I'll be going through the process for making this wall

Step 1

Ready to get started

I cleaned the room and walls, put everything away, took the covers off of the outlets and light switches and move furniture to middle of room. Then I patched the holes in wall and re-caulked the window.

Note on Cutting in:

Cutting in was done entirely by hand. I find that taping gives me a false sense of security when cutting in. When I cut in with tape, I apply paint very liberally and I will get a lot of bleed through that is more of a pain to touch up than If I did it carefully in the first place.  I always have a paint rag with me to immediately clean up mistakes but for the most part I don't have any issues.  I also use a 1 1/2 inch brush for cutting in; it's wide enough to allow overlap with the roller but spreads the paint more evenly than a 3 inch brush.

Step 2: priming

For this room I painted over a yellow with light blue paint so I used a full tint primer to make sure that the yellow was covered really well. The primer did a great job and I only had to do one coat of primer. I also did a primer coat on the window trim with regular white primer.

The first prime

 Step 3: painting

I painted 2 colours concurrently so it was a bit challenging.   I had to have 2 brushes for cutting in, 2 rollers and 2 paint pans.  I knew the darker colour would need 3 coats so I painted it first to allow it time to dry while I did the cutting in and painting of the lighter colour.

This strategy worked well and by the end of Saturday I had put a coat of primer and 3 coats of dark paint on one wall and then a coat of primer and 2 coats of light blue on the other walls.

Step 4: the stripes

I drew out the design a couple of times on graph paper to make sure I knew what I was doing before I started painting.  There was math involved... I divided the height into 6 parts to get the 3 stripes. With 8 foot ceilings that meant that each stripe would be 16 inches wide.  I wanted the stripes to zigzag every 3 feet by going up and down half the width of the stripe itself. Then I had to figure out how far down the wall to start so that the dark stripes were centred on the wall. Rather than starting 16 inches down on the first side I started 12 inches down at the first marker and then for the second marker I started 4 inches down to get an 8 inch difference in height for the zigzag. Once the starting point was established I then just measured out 16 inches to the next mark. 

The only "complicated" math came when  the room was only 14 feet wide rather than 15 feet (3 doesn’t go into 14 as nicely as it does 15...), which meant that instead of starting 4 inches down on the far wall I started 5 inches down to maintain the same angle as the other zigzags... You can figure out why... Grade 10 geometry came in pretty handy.

Once all of the I marked out my points I started taping. I used frog tape; I found it to be worth the extra couple of bucks per roll. Less bleed through than the 3m edge lock tape...  Using the 2 inch tape made it easy to keep the tape lines straight.

The tape lines

Cutting both top and bottom pieces of tape

The next challenge was cutting the tape with a knife of exact 0 to clean up where the stripe zigzagged.  I started by first trimming both sides of the zigzag.

Then realized that I only had to trim the bottom piece of tape and then peel back the top piece to make a nice zig (or zag depending on your perspective). This saved time and potential errors... The tape is already straight whereas my knife cuts may not be.

Cut the bottom tape and peel back the top tape

Stripes are ready to be painted in

After that the painting was easy, very little cutting in had to be done because I had cleverly made the dark stripes centered on the wall... and the stripes were wide enough to use a full size roller to apply the paint. The hardest part was waiting for the paint to dry between coats.

Stripes filled in!

 Step 5: touch up and clean up

I pretty much peeled the tape of right away after I finished painting and while the frog tape worked well there was some bleed through to clean up. After peeing off the tape I waited about 30 minutes until the paint was dry enough to cover the bleed through with the lighter blue without mixing the colours on the wall. I also touched up marks on the wall from the pencil marks and tool marks from measuring.  Finally I also touched up my cutting in lines to make them very straight and consistent across all 3 colours.

The end result is a nice accent wall with a deep blue wall for contrast: