The shelf in this closet was pulling away from the wall - the nail holding the rod and shelf in place had been more than half-way yanked from the wall. My guess would be that someone placed too much weight on the shelf/rod for many years.
So we pulled out the shelving unit, which went fairly smoothly. I used a crowbar on one side, and accidentally poked a hole in the wall. So we used our new patching drywall skills to fix my mess!
N was much more methodical on the other side of the wall, where he first exposed the nails, dug around them, and then carefully removed them leaving no damage except nail holes.
Then we moved on to texturing the newly exposed areas.
After the texture was done, we painted the ceiling white, and the majority of the walls yellow. We marked out how the stripes would be placed in the closet, and where the yellow would be exposed we painted a second coat of yellow paint.
Then it was time to tape the walls. This part of the process was very time consuming. The pattern we decided on was to have tweleve inch stripes of yellow and red (the yellow from the bathroom downstairs, the red a new color). N and I were concerned that it might look a little too much like a circus tent, so we decided to include a two-inch orange stripe in the center of the yellow stripes.
The taped closet:
Close up detail of the tape:
Although we taped the closet, we weren't sure if the paint would bleed through the tape or how neat our lines would turn out. We decided to paint the small orange stripes first:
With the tape off:
We were actually really happy with the orange! The lines were fairly straight, and where the lines isn't straight, it's a natural bleed out onto texture. The stripes aren't too fussy. Now it was time for the red:
I had bought a quart of this red paint (COLOR NAME) at Lowe's, and when N opened it up the paint was much thinner than we were used to with the Valspar paint. This was both good and bad; the good: the paint was thin enough that one quart could completely cover the red sections of the closet (but only just). The bad: the paint was very thin and spotty.
Red paint with tape up:
Even after a second coat (with a new full gallon of paint that was the usual consistency), the tops and corners of the red were uneven. Also, the thin red paint had leaked under the tape quite a bit in some areas, so I went back with a small brush and covered some of the red spots with yellow, and with another brush went over the weak spots in the red:
The last of the can of red paint:
