When getting pieces for house decorations, it is prudent to go for horizontal and vertical strips. For the horizontal strips, the net effect is a larger room appearing to note spacious. It is a simple mechanism to decorate a house, and the net result is a perceived dimensions and size of a room. Carefully measure the tape.

Before purchasing any paint or tape, stand in the room and decide which direction your stripes will run. Consider the room's proportions: a narrow room benefits most from horizontal stripes, while a room with a low ceiling benefits most from vertical. Sketch the layout on paper with rough measurements before touching the wall — this planning step catches proportion problems early and helps you visualize the finished result before committing.

In the presence of all the essential materials, for painting and the room is in a transparent state and ready for painting, the undercoat used to paint the wall has to be the lightest among the two colors chosen for the job. Leave it to dry for a duration of 4 hours or set to dry the whole night to achieve quality and desirable results.

Applying the lighter of your two colors as the basecoat across the entire wall is essential — this color will become one set of stripes automatically, with no additional painting required. Rushing the drying time is the most common mistake in stripe painting. If the basecoat is not fully dry and cured before you apply tape, the tape can lift the basecoat when removed, leaving ragged edges and ruined stripes. When in doubt, let it dry overnight rather than the minimum 4 hours, especially in humid climates like Houston or Nashville where ambient moisture slows curing.

Ascertained the drying of the basecoat before one decides the stripping decoration. For the stripes, marking and measuring the wall are the first steps of the process. The last seen corner acts as the starting point of the measurement followed by a division of the wall. 4 and 12 inches wide are the average sizes of the strips.

Starting from an obscure corner — typically the corner least visible when entering the room, often behind a door — makes any small measurement inconsistencies invisible in normal use. Mark your stripe widths clearly with a pencil dot at the top, middle, and bottom of the wall at each stripe interval. These marks become your guide points for the tape line in the next step.

The wall is marked or plotted with the corresponding lines to those of the strips by employing the use of a tape measure, solving the hustle involved in making new marks each time you complete painting the initially marked piece.

For similar strip measurements, the overall measurements of the wall taken and in turn divided by the number or another option would be to take the wall's size and divided by a chosen odd number to help get the strip width desired.

Plotting all lines at once before applying any tape is a significant time-saver and accuracy improvement over marking one stripe at a time. Once all marks are in place, connect them with a chalk line snapped across the full wall length to give you a perfectly straight guideline to tape against. This full-wall plotting also lets you step back and visually verify the layout before committing to the tape and paint.

Involves the creation of an outline. The process includes the use of a straight edge or level in coming up with the draft. The safe release tape or the low tack tape offers great results.

Apply the tape to the outside edge of each chalk line — meaning the tape sits on the basecoat stripe that you are protecting, not on the stripe you will be painting. Press the tape edge down firmly with a putty knife or credit card to seal it against paint bleed. For especially clean edges, some professionals apply a thin coat of the basecoat color along the tape edge first, allow it to dry, then paint the stripe color — the basecoat seals the tape edge and any bleed takes the form of the basecoat color rather than the contrasting stripe color.

For an imperfect outcome in the measurement of stripes, the small differences in the marks are likely invisible to many people, based on the compound nature of the starting point at the corner. For more accurate and exact results of the strips, an adjustment of the strip is necessary to widths of the last wall. A difference of about one quarter to a half inch is not readily noticeable to the naked eye.

Paint the exposed stripes with the second color using a small roller for the field and an angled brush to cut in along the tape edges. Apply two coats if needed, allowing the first coat to dry before the second. Remove the tape while the second coat is still slightly wet — not fully dry — pulling it back at a 45-degree angle away from the painted stripe for the cleanest possible edge. If you wait until the paint is fully dry, the dried film can tear along the tape edge and create ragged lines.