Purple people-eater

As teenage girls we got pretty excited to paint our rooms, so we used exciting paint colors, like VERY purple and VERY blue and we weren't very experienced, so they turned out very... interesting. But hey, we worked hard, so they stayed! Now with all the Gustavson kids grown up, it was time the rooms grew up, too. The purple room got painted (the blue room is on the queue), though it is still a work in progress - we're rearranging some furniture and hoping to get a small writing desk or vanity in addition, plus put some more photos, shelves, gorgeous white curtains with darker purple accent borders (made by Yours Truly), redo the closet interior, perhaps new closet doors, put in new carpet with new trim (should I keep going?) ... but we are THRILLED with the changes thus far! I give you: before and after! Although this photos looks more purple than the others, it isn't. Just a bad photo, we were trying to capture the fact that there are now blinds.

OK, so this room wasn't nearly as exciting as the little bathroom. I had accidentally partially stripped the room before I took "before" photos so the random decorating scheme isn't fully revealed, plus there are about 1,001 things still left to do, but I was so excited about the light touch of lavender walls and the cool border! If you, too, would like to know how to paint perfectly straight lines on a textured wall, listen up:

1. Tape where you'd like the lines to be

2. Paint where you want your lines to be, NOT in the color you want the finished lines, but the EXISTING color of the wall. Paint will bleed through tape on textured walls, no matter how carefully you pressed it down, so this allows the existing color to bleed through so you won't notice it, and creates a barrier so the REAL color you wanted will peel right up with the tape!

3. NOW paint the color you want the lines to be over that first layer you just painted. Sounds time-consuming, but it's worth it.

So as an example: if your walls are white but you want a blue stripe, put your tape down, then paint white where you want the blue stripe, making sure to cover the inner edges of the tape. Sounds counter-intuitive, but keep going. When that dries, paint blue where you want the blue stripe. The first coat of white paint will be covered, and there are no messy blue bleed-throughs! Ta-Da!