The one with the... Baby Nursery (Part 1 - Wall Paint)
Wow, it's been almost 9 months since our last blog post. And there is good reason for it! You see, we've been a little busy... because any day now, we are expecting a baby boy!
Back in June we were finally able to start working on the nursery. We had one empty bedroom that we had planned to use as the baby's room, so we cleaned out the random stuff we had in there and got to work. First project on the list-- painting!
Here's what the room looked like before. The walls were a Tiffany blue color from the previous owners.
The room is actually a pretty good size.
With a substantial closet, especially for a little baby.
When you open the closet, you get a nice surprise. It was painted a chalkboard paint that was mossy green! Doesn't that look so great next to the Tiffany blue? Also, notice that all of the trim and the doors are an off-white color.
First task was to pick out a paint color! By June we knew that we were having a boy! I didn't want to paint the room the typical "baby blue" or "baby green" or even "baby yellow." I wanted a color that was a little more neutral and would last a while as our child grew up. A neutral color would also allow us to use various accent colors to dress up the room however we want!
Of course Pinterest had some good ideas, including this striped wall:
Board and batten in white on the bottom and navy on top:
And yellow wall with navy and white accents:
All of these nurseries are super cute and had their own charm. In the end, the color scheme that we decided on included: gray, white, navy blue, and yellow. We also decided to add a chair rail and paint the top gray and the bottom white.
We measured out where we wanted the chair rail and used the chalk line to mark it. From there, I primed the bottom half and painted it with Behr Decorator White paint in a high gloss that we already had on hand. I figured that the high gloss would be easy to clean when the baby is crawling and walking around and touching the wall with his dirty hands/fingers.
The closet also got primed and multiple coats paint. I had to get Dave to help me with painting the closet because there were certain parts of the closet that I couldn't get to easily, being 7 months pregnant and all...
Then I painted the top half of the room in Benjamin Moore's Bunny Gray. After I finished painting two coats of Bunny Gray, Dave installed the chair rail. We borrowed a nail gun from our neighbors, which was really helpful for putting up the chair rail. Oh, and once the Decorator White paint went in, all of the other parts of the room looked very yellow-- including the crown molding, window trim, baseboards, and closet doors). They all got a few coats of the same Decorator White paint.
The high gloss paint is a little thick and I didn't want paint brush marks on the molding. I had read about a product called Floetrol, which when added to paint, thins it out a little but increases the drying time so it limits the brush marks. I picked some up at the local Sherwin Williams paint store and it worked like a charm!
Notice that the door is still off-white. We had some big plans for the door-- stay tuned to find out what we did!
It's amazing how big of a difference paint makes! The room looked much lighter and brighter with the gray and white paint! In the next post, we start filling the room with furniture!
