Masking tape for sharp paint lines

When decorating a child's bedroom or playroom it always starts with the prepartion, moving and covering any furniture, filling and sanding any holes or cracks and finally taping woodwork or any electrical fixtures. The more you do in the preparation stage the easier the painting stage will become.

Before you apply any paint on the walls we recommend completing your woodwork first, it might be tempting to flood the walls with colour first (it certainly feels like you're making quicker progress) but this can create trickier problems if you make a mistake. Trying to wipe a satin or eggshell paint off of a wall is a lot trickier compared to removing emulsion paint off of finished woodwork. We've tried both ways in what seems like a wildly debated topic of walls first/woodwork second or woodwork first followed by the walls, finding the latter has always returned a better finish.

Taping your woodwork

Everybody likes clean crisp lines on their woodwork but not all masking tapes are equal, tapes that pull off paint when you've finished can be infuriating.

We've found that the best tapes for maintaining sharp lines without paint bleed is Frog Tape. We used this to create our painted Treehouse and again when applying our Tree stencils.

We also recently reached out to our friend @caulfield_custom_decor on the topic. A good friend of ours and someone who really sets the level of professional decorating. Asking him the question of what masking tape he uses and recommends. His choice was Tesa.

Recommending Tesa Yellow for low tack and Tesa Pink for delicate surfaces such as wallpaper or recently painted surfaces. Although Tesa tape is not as readily available as Frog Tape at your everyday DIY store, it can be purchased online and at stores such as Brewers and if you need to purchase the paint too, it's the perfect location to get both at the same time.

You can search to see if there is a store near you here.