Stripetacular!

Just days ago I was debating what color to paint the stripes in our foyer and now, I crane my head into the small entrance room and spy the most fantastic horizontal geometry to hit ever the walls of Apartment 9A. We started with a pretty intense plan as you can see below-

A diet coke, an iPhone, a number 2 pencil and some junk mail used as scrap paper. We don't mess around here.

Roommate Lindsay Ann and I met in the Oop's Paint aisle at the 59th street Home Depot the day before. We had 4 or 5 different shades of taupey gray, but landed on this Behr Paint & Primer in flat enamel. I'm a fan of Oop's paint for 2 main reasons: It's $5 for a GALLON and it helps limit down the overwhelming selection of paint colors out there. I'm from the camp of "lets just pick one and make it work." So we did. And boy did it work.

All in all we bought 4 rolls of 1 inch thick blue tape, 1 gallon of $5 Oops paint and a small painters kit that came with a paint tray, 2 rollers and a brush. We ghetto rigged giant trash bags as drop cloths leaving our grand total room reno cost at about $30.

It's amazing what a little paint can do.

The taping was, undoubtedly, the hardest part. After 2 hours of taping, leveling and cussing, we finally had our room lined in blue.

Don't you love the satisfaction of opening a new can of paint?

And painting the first couple of stripes.

This is around the time we started obsessing over how great the gray was looking. We were, however, nervous about peeling off the blue tape. I mean, how well could a little blue tape really work??

Pretty darn well!

And for the finished room...

The mirror above used to hang in Lindsay Ann's room. Because the stripes are so design prevalent, we repurposed it as a tray. It maintains its character, but carries a new sophistication.

We'll probably end up putting new fabric in the black IKEA frame, but for now, I love the simple graphic quality in between those lamps!

We are thrilled! Not only was the experience fun, but the results are totally better than we anticipated!! Every time I walk into the room, I feel like I'm living in a blog. And, our makeshift buffet/credenza/*street merch wouldn't be complete without the latest issue of Garden & Gun.

Hope you enjoyed the foyer overhaul!

**Street Merch: Abandoned furniture found on the side of the streets of New York City, left for others to claim. The term was coined by a self-employed advertiser who runs his company out of Dallas.