standard 2-color chevron stripes are pretty straight forward.

but two colors are boring, so lets use four….or five or six or seven.

I promise this is super easy. the hardest part is the math.

paint the wall of choice with a base color – this color will act as a small chevron stripe in between each large chevron stripe. let it dry then tape up the baseboards.

you need to decide a few things: how many stripes you want, how big you want them to be, and what your color pattern will be. draw it out until you find a design you like. this is what I ended up with:

write down your colors if needed and any other notes for yourself.

measure your wall and write the measurements down on your sketch. now dissect the sketch into boxes. place vertical lines at each point – high and low – and horizontal lines between each stripe so that you have a grid of boxes. count the number of boxes and divide the wall measurement by that number to decide how big each box needs to be on the wall.

Example: my wall was 94 inches tall and I had 6 horizontal lines – so each box had to be 15.6 inches tall. The wall was 132 inches long and I had 8 vertical lines, so each box had to be 16.5 inches wide.

write down how big each box needs to be so you don’t get confused.

*make sure you measure from the ceiling to the top of the baseboard – if you measure all the way to the floor it will throw off your entire measurement.

starting from the ceiling, mark out points with a pencil that match the measurements of the height of your boxes and mark points going across that match the width of your boxes.

Now take a chalk line and matching it up to the points you marked, snap lines on the wall to make a grid.

It should look something like this when you’re done:

the genius thing about this is that where you tape to separate the big stripes, the base color will stay and act as a divider between the large stripes – so you can choose as many colors as you want. each large stripe can be a different color and it will be just as easy as if you were only using two. and the small stripe adds a different dimension to the standard chevron pattern.

so, tape. use scissors on the tape to make sure you get a clean edge as opposed to ripping it. line one edge of the tape up with the top corner of the top left box and match it to the bottom corner of the box so that you divide the box in half – choose either top or bottom of the tape, it doesn’t matter, just stay consistent. Now you’ll start from bottom to top on the next box and repeat until each box has been taped. Make sure the tape overlaps so that you have clean points. Your end result will look like this ( the boxes are visible towards the top of the photo):

once you get into a rhythm, the taping goes by really fast. I taped the entire wall in about 35-45 minutes.

now you can paint.

paint in between the tape with chosen colors – as many as you’d like. do two coats and pull the tape as soon as you’re done painting the second coat.

This will be your end result:

(I used 3 colors for the big stripes)

My point is that chevron isn’t scary.

it’s actually really easy, even with lots of colors.

now go forth into the world and paint shit chevron.

I still have lots to do in B’s new nursery before I do a tour of sorts or enter in any more contests.

But it will be even more glorious than his first room.

sitting in a dark hallway, surrounded by glass, water reflecting on our skin. tiny fingers pointing, tiny eyes open wide. the perfect laughter of my child echoing in my ears, bouncing off the smoky walls in crystal prisms. sharks and turtles and coral, stingrays and fish and all the things he’s never seen, infinite wonder waiting just below the surface. running in the dark, back lit by a wall of blue, of swimming shadows.

welcome home.

so. this is what the living room looks like now. we primed the fireplace – I still need to paint it white and stain the mantle darker. also, the toy box is being made over and I’m making a cushion for the top so that when people are over, we can hide all the kid crap and make it a bench. and the tiles will be gone and the concrete painted dark brown. and I want to get (or make…?) some painted tiles and line the inside of the two cutouts in the wall that separates the living room and lounge. and one day I would like a purple couch. and we need a rug. and I need to hang up some stuff on the walls and make the beaded curtain for behind the TV. and we talked about replacing the sliders with french doors down the road. and I have a GIANT chandelier sitting in the garage that I want to paint green and hang up…but husband already vetoed that idea.

i fucking love this house.

red hearts. candles burning. homemade heart pop tarts. breakfast in bed. a little note. true love. heart shaped dream catchers. happy baby. red glitter. extra kisses. fondue party. milk steak. rose petals. bad tv.

“I love you Jamie Dunn, words and actions will never be able to express the amount.”

the only words I ever want to hear.

we were laying on the floor, every blanket we owned spread out beneath us, a fire burning at our feet. a movie was playing and I was flipping through cookbooks. my hair was down, spilling over the pages, snaking down my back in tendrils. I made hot chocolate, spilled scotch on the kitchen counter, let stella curl into my side. and while we lied there on the living room floor, the feeling finally went away, finally just let me go.

the feeling …not sadness, not anger. not any feeling that has a name. the nameless feeling that cuts at the center of your being, dead thorns and broken glass. it’s heavy, this feeling…deep and cold and heavy. it’s suddenly opening your eyes and finding yourself in a swamp. and you dont know how you got there and you dont know where you came from…but you look behind you in the distance and you see a stand of black trees that pierce the sky and call your name. but those trees, they scare you, and you don’t know why. you don’t want to breathe their air, to fall into their shade…and you never want them to find you. so you face the swamp you’re standing in with the vague notion that you shouldn’t be here, that this is somehow all wrong. but there’s something coming, something pulsing at the faintest edges of your subconscious mind that pushes you forward. the water is black in the swamp and it’s deep, deep and cold and heavy. you’re stuck now, trudging through the water, clawing at the roots of trees, trying to get out because there are terrible things below the surface of that water and you can’t see them. and the swamp…the swamp knows you’re there when you shouldn’t be.

and you’re lost and confused and the panic starts somewhere deep, spiraling up through your chest in ropes.

and you don’t know where you’re going.

or where you’ve been.

or how you got there.

but something’s coming for you up out of that water.

]]> http://www.blog.easilydunn.com/2012/02/13/lost/feed/ 1 http://www.blog.easilydunn.com/2012/02/12/weekend-playlist-vol-36/ http://www.blog.easilydunn.com/2012/02/12/weekend-playlist-vol-36/#comments Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:25:45 +0000 Jamie http://www.blog.easilydunn.com/?p=6818 soundtrack for a sunday.

]]> http://www.blog.easilydunn.com/2012/02/12/weekend-playlist-vol-36/feed/ 1 http://www.blog.easilydunn.com/2012/02/09/old-gypsy-woman-spoke-to-me/ http://www.blog.easilydunn.com/2012/02/09/old-gypsy-woman-spoke-to-me/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:48:41 +0000 Jamie http://www.blog.easilydunn.com/?p=6814 …lips stained red from a bottle of wine.

B unpacking flamingos / laughing in the bathtub / snuggling with Captain Matt in front of our fireplace / day 1 of pacifier weaning / IKEA ice cream / sitting in his laundry basket / bathtub reflection / first crayon masterpiece / playing in the grass / leaving toys in my shower / about to tackle mommy / getting into his jeep / typing away / I have no idea / sassy pants / face scratch / sneaky baby / record player / chicks laying eggs. finally / staring out the window / reading the newspaper / mopping / playing in the toy box / basketball shorts / destroying his bedroom.

I found this when I was going through old pictures of Nana, crying and eating a bowl of chocolate pudding all by myself sprawled out on the living room floor. for a second it made me laugh. I was one, Alex was two…so close and so far away.

our home, in its current state.

this is what I’m calling the lounge – I guess it was originally intended to be a formal sitting room. So we knocked out part of the wall to open it to the living room and ripped out the carpet and painted the concrete. the plan for the lounge is to just be the room with the bar and record player and guitars and piano. We’re going to make some floor cushions and pouf things and hang curtains. I want to get a narrow wine rack for next to the book case, which needs some storage for all of our bar glasses and cards and what not. Old afghans for the chaise and lights strung from the ceiling. We need to paint the baseboards still. And build a giant bar and unpack some boxes and hang our metallic gold fringe behind the tv. (yes. another tv.) and I want to get a giant rug and throw away the zebra one…that rug and stella had a very intimate relationship for two very long years. It’s the first room you see when you walk in.

so, we should have just sucked it up and rented the industrial sander before we painted the concrete – so when we do the rest of the house, we’ll re-do this room. and we should have given another day to fully cure before moving in furniture, but we knew we would re-do it later, so whatever. it was the trial and error room. and even with a few imperfections, we love the painted concrete. love. and it’s going to look amazing in the rest of the house. right now the wall color kind of looks washed out with the white tile…but I love the wall color too. it’s a kind of grey/green tinted white, and we’re deciding which walls need to be accent walls and what kind of crazy shit I can paint on them.

also, we built a room, kind of.

the door needs to be painted black like all the other doors. also, I want to figure some kind of cool light. and I want to get a dresser/hutch with a mirror and put against that wall with the crap on it. and paint leopard spots all over it. and get a little rug and the closet door needs a big knob.

in time.