apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I love all these striped walls, but how do they make the stripes so straight? Is there a trick?

I like 'em too, only catch is that the adhesive on masking tape is nasty nasty stuff. It will stain the walls and either flake off leaving dusty adhesive or fuse with the walls making it impossible to remove.

One's better off just painting stripes and the repainting upon moving out...

Tape dries out and changes color over time. Looks nice, but not practical long term.

I love how trashy it is. Trash it up! Yeah! What's next? Eating out of the garbage? Fun!

I agree, it's sort of cute now, but masking tape is grungy stuff. The luckiest outcome for those stripes is that the tape quietly dries up and mostly falls off the wall - taking its dried-up adhesive residue with it, instead of leaving splotches of the dried gunk on the walls.

I once found some ancient masking tape that had been left on a wall in an old house I bought - high up and under the old heavy drapes. It left a mess behind when removed.

It's this kind of creativity that makes future tenants cringe! I've been wanting to wallpaper one of the [plaster] walls in my living room but I snap myself out of it when I think of someone else having to deal with it! I figure they'll already have enough work with painting over my chocolate brown walls.

(If you happen to own your place, well, that's a different story altogether.)

To each his own. I would never use masking tape on my walls though. Just paint the stripes already--or leave it alone.

Also, I thought this wall was so different from the others in the room so as to make the whole space seem choppy. They could have put up molding... They could have done a lot of things...

Or...less is more.

Thanks for adding the "Great Little Idea" feature to this contest; am I wrong that we haven't seen something similar in earlier contests? Its a nice way to sift a selection of creative highlights (love em or hate em) from all of this year's entries.

Absolutely clever!

If you use acid-free masking tape you probably won't have as many problems.

hi guys
we have the masking tape up for over 2 years now and i haven't noticed any discoloration (guess it depends on the quality of the tape).
we love the contrast of the structured paper against the matt white wall which adds interest and makes it look more like a wallpaper (plus it gives us the sharp lines you can never achieve with paint).
hakarl

i love that lamp. where did it come from?

I think I liked it better when I thought it was paint. Oh well, it still looks really cute! I didn't even know that they made that color of masking tape!

Julia -- That's the hearty original color of masking tape.

What's ironic is that it would have been terrible for actually painting the stripes. Absolutely preventing paint leakage under the stripes requires the ultra-sticky green masking tape used by that woman on TV who faux-paints everything in sight.

sherri
this is a classic arc floor lamp from the 70s -- we found it on a flea market here in NY. It has a metal base and is height adjustable.
hakarl

I hate being negative or critical, but I just don't dig the mirrored room divider thing or the masking tape. In a photo it might look fine, but up close, it just looks like, well, tape on the wall. Mmmm not for me. The best thing about the apartment in my opinion is the bright colored living room walls. That I totally dig!

Apartment Therapy Copyediting 101
The name for a surface that is not shiny but rather intentionally dull is MATTE.
The name for a man who doesn't want to be called by his full name, Matthew, is MATT.

MATT=personal name
MATTE=adjective describing a characteristic of a surface.

Thanks for attending today's class. Please help yourself to the refreshments in the lobby. I made the Toll House cookies myself. Next session: A "chaise longue" (Fr., translation "long chair") is not a "chaise lounge" (Amer., mistranslation of Fr. "longue," meaning "long" for "lounge" meaning, roughly, "relax and lay back.")

Erratum:
The word "long" should read "long,". Thanks for playing.