My front hall staircase is what can best be described as blah. I don’t have a problem with the beige paint color, but because we have a classic Cape style home, the staircase is essentially enclosed in the center of the house. There is no beautiful railing (I despise the railing) or light flowing through so needless to say, it needs a major makeover. I’ve been trying to decide what to do for a while. During this same while I was trying to figure out where in my house to paint nautical stripes (because I just can’t get enough of them and I’ve never seen them painted anywhere before). And then the light-bulb went off in my head that the staircase would be the perfect spot as I do majorly love painted stair risers!

The nice thing about doing this on stair risers is that you’ve already got a bottom and top straight line to easily work off of. My risers are 6″ high, and my tape was 1 1/2″ wide. I actually measured the stripes on one of my many sailor stripe shirts to get the proper ratio. And as such I needed a 3/4″ navy stripe to make it work. After I put the top and bottom pieces of tape on, I eye-balled it (because I’m impatient) to center the third piece and get the proper size stripes (and my eye-balls worked just fine I think). You can see there is a small piece of molding between the top piece of tape and the stair tread. That was also painted navy, and to be honest, one of the reasons I laid the pattern out in this order is because I was concerned that once I got the stripes painted that I would want to paint the treads as well so I figured the navy could just be carried over onto the tread if need be.

So I applied the three stripes of tape as well as one on each side so as not to get paint on the molding. One problem I ran into is that I really loved these green stripes. I was tempted to just get the Exacto knife out and trim the tape ends and have green striped stairs. And if you’re in a rental, it seriously might not be a bad option!

But voila! I went ahead and painted them anyway. I used Benjamin Moore’s Old Navy. Unfortunately, my tape did not create quite the clean lines that I wanted despite the fact that I bought the one the paint store told me to. There are definitely some spots that need touching up, but there is also something I like about it not being perfect. I’m certainly far from it so why does my staircase need to be. And regardless, every time I turn the corner to head upstairs I’m still surprised by the new look, and pleasantly so. It really makes the space so much more interesting.

But this is just the beginning. That railing has got to go and I’ve got some objects that need to be hung in my new nautical staircase. So stay tuned….

And don’t miss more stripes tomorrow. Amy has also been painting stripes in more than one spot in her house!