Incorrigible Geek Nonsense Blog

Unless you want to lose your fucking mind.

But if you want to go insane, here’s the easiest way to do it:

First, you pick your paint colors.  I decided to go with blues, because why the fuck not?

Step 1: Paint your base color on the wall.  Here you can see that I didn’t bother painting too close to the holes in the wall from the hardware, because I was being silly.  I decided that the background color would be a baby blue.  Looked a little less blue on the swatch, but whatever.

Step 2: Tape off your lines.  Pretend not to notice that your wall is curved and indented and shit and you’ll never get it perfect.  Give in to that agony.

The painter’s tape used at this stage was this standard blue shit.

Step 3: PAINT OVER YOUR TAPE WITH YOUR BASE COLOR.  The internet told me to do this, so I did.  

I didn’t take any images of that step, so here’s more of my shitty taping job.

Step 4: Fill in every other line or whatever the shit you want your pattern to look like with your next color.  I chose to add a color that I hadn’t picked initially: ALMOST BLACK (a dark grey color called “Pencil lead”).

Don’t worry about anything you fuck up, because you’ll definitely have to do touch ups afterward.  (Do some touch ups now if they’re ugly smudges like I have in a few spots)

I decided that I was going to fix the lines around the ceiling and baseboards after it was all done, so I kinda threw caution into the wind and just went bananas at times.  

But, hey, it turns out that that whole “paint over it with that color of paint that already exists” thing has some merit.  These lines look sharp in most spots.

Step 5: tape off for the next set of lines.  I was a lot more precise with my measuring for these ones.  I went a little anal retentive.

I used a combination of that same standard blue painters tape and some of this fancy shit:

I had tried to figure out how the shit I was going to seal the paint edges without being able to easily perform my “just paint the edges the color of the background”...because now I had two background colors.

So, I found this shit and decided to give it a whirl.  

Step 6: Paint the new lines and try not to murder anyone.

Success.  So, again, you can really notice that the wall is not exactly perfectly flat.  I’m not sure where the construction-dudes found convex drywall, but props to them for being interesting and inventive.

I’ll go into more detail at the end of this post about the tape and what I experienced with all of the tapes I tried.  

Step 7: Tape up some mothafookin more lines and try not to kill yourself.

You’ll notice that there’s no picture here.  The reason for that is that I switched to this fancier tape (costs $2 more per roll) which touted this shit called “edge lock.”  It wouldn’t stick to the wall long, so I had to tape, paint, tape, paint, tape, paint.  WEEEEE

Step 8 (the REVEAL): Paint your final fucking lines and try not to punch holes in the wall.

You may be thinking: Shit!  That looks great (minus the ceiling and baseboards)!

You’re wrong. And I’ll show you why while breaking down the processes from the tapes.

Here’s a closeup image of the lines.  

First off, the colors in this image aren’t accurate, but there is no need to color-correct to make my point.  And the angle of my camera distorted the line directions (they’re far straighter vertically than they appear).  Whatever.  

By FAR, the lines made with the initial tape/painting the base-color (1) down before painting the stripes (2) was the best.  I don’t think that this method requires fancy tape or shitty tape, as long as the tape sticks and you paint the base color atop the tape to seal the leakage off, you’re golden.

The orange frog tape with the strange mixture shit (seen above) was used to paint the double lines (3).  This was definitely second place, but I advise to make sure you really get that clear shit on there good before you go for it, as you can see there are some significant leaky spots.   Also of note, if you look at where the color meets from 2 and 3, you’ll see what looks like the paint from 3 spooged a little onto 2.  By spooge, I mean white’ish discharge.  The spooge is the clear shit that helps lock the frog tape edges to provide crisp lines.  If you look in the finished image, you can spot places on the dark paint that this spillover occurred.  Barf.

Something else the clear stuff did? I used a flat paint.  The clear shit is glossy.  Any spots on the base color that got that shit on it?  They’re now shiny.  I’ll have to touch those up with the base color to re-flattify those fuckers.

So, I only recommend using the frog tape clear stuff (and I certainly think it’s worthwhile if you are more patient than myself) is if you’re using a semi-gloss paint and the colors aren’t as dark as my soul.

The final color was painted on with the tape that has at least 20 minutes of made-up songs (by me) about how horrible it is.  Look at the lines from 4 above.  They’re fuzzy and crappy.  Edge lock fail.  To even get a line out of this tape (and I was fucking determined to), I had to continually smooth over my tape to make sure it stayed put, or the shit would just straight up detach and fall off the wall. No joke.  I was fighting the clock with this tape.  I don’t know if it doesn’t like flat paint, or textured walls, or some combination therein, but I was certainly hitting its no-no triggers.

Knowing that I was somewhat doing this for shits and giggles, I decided to persevere and make it through this project with the crappy taaaappppppeeee, the crappieesssttt of alllll the taaapppppeesssss (**sings**).

Anyhow, that’s my journey to plaid walls and I will probably go crazytown bananapants and just paint it over a solid color after I try touching things up to make the lines better.  If I even get the motivation to do that.  

My extremely minor OCD likes to take different forms.  One of those forms includes organizing things in interesting and/or delightful ways. 

On the internet, I had seen these adorable Chemistry kit spice racks.  They consisted of roughly 12 containers to store your dry ingredients in.  They were in test tubes and had cute pre-made labels.

See here ($30-50, depending on if it’s on sale or not)

I thought that was great.  But, because I’m not just a touch OCD but also an overanalytical nutbag, I decided there were flaws with this set.

The test tube plugs are not well-sealed caps.  They don’t twist or latch on, they just shove in.  This doesn’t work well for my klutz-potential.  

There isn’t enough space in a tube to get a tablespoon in there or even put enough spice/seasoning in there to make it worthwhile for storage, so I’d be refilling those bishes if I cooked frequently.

There weren’t enough of them.

They are expensive for what they are.

Then, I went looking for my own various lab volumetric storage components.  There were not reasonable prices available. 

I decided to find small, SERIOUSLY-SEALING, BPA-free (lolz), spice-jars to utilize in my spice-reorganization project.

I went with these. $25.  

Then, I needed something to make labels.  I went with these.   $6.

$31, not too shabby.

Here’s what I started with:

Here’s what I wound up with:

Here’s some photos along the way:

I’m pleased with the results and my minor OCD is satiated for now.  **cackles**