Nursery Decorating Chapter 1: Sometimes Progress Isn't Pretty

 For the past several months, our nursery has looked something like this.

Very soon after finding out I was pregnant and (before we were even telling people), we came across this crib for sale on Craigslist. I knew I wanted a Jenny Lind style spindle crib in dark wood, and this one, which was only two years old, was an amazing deal at only $60. So we removed our old guest bed and moved in the crib.

Then, in May after my grandfather passed away, were were in his hometown of Perry, Iowa for the funeral, and happened upon a wonderful little antique store. We purchased the rocker, whose arms you can just see in the bottom right corner of the photo. More photos of him to come, but with this purchase we had all the furniture pieces selected for the room - crib, wide dresser, old living room chaise (bottom left) rocker and tall dresser (which can't be see but is next to the rocker). We figured out the general furniture layout we liked and things have sat since then.

Until last week! I decided it was time to attack. Chris was planning on being out of town for the weekend, so I called in some help in the form of my sister and her six-year-old daughter Annabel to get some painting going. Before we could get started though, I had some prep to do.

Chris and I weighed the options of replacing baseboards in the room vs. refinishing them like we did in our own room two and a half years ago. While we like to preserve as much of the house's original materials as much as possible, we decided it made more sense to just start new with these boards for several reasons:

• They were ROUGH. I don't have photographic evidence, but believe me - these ones were in way worse shape than any of the other trim in the house.
• We would have to sand down a lot to get them paintable, risking scattering lead paint dust around our child's future room - not an idea we love.
• The aren't the "nice original wood" we love in the house. Don't get me wrong - fixed up they'll look like a million bucks, but they are low grade pine - not stain grade oak like we have on our main level.
• We can match the style in new boards for about $100 in materials - saving a lot of time and eliminating nearly all of the mess. 

So out the baseboards came! Painting without the baseboards meant that we wouldn't have to worry about edging the bottom of the wall (yay!) and that any damage done in removing them could be repaired prior to painting and putting the new boards in. They came out very easily - I did it by myself in about an hour.

After clearing out the room and purchasing some supplies, we were left with the below scene. See those scratches on the walls? Those are no accident. After I removed the baseboards, Chris and I took a paint scraper and sanding block to the walls to knock off some texture.

We love smooth walls, and while this step still left them far from perfectly smooth, it did take off some of the bumpier spots and goobly-goshes, as we call them. So yes - sometimes progress looks like this.  

Chris also did some light sanding on the window trim, so that it would be ready for a fresh coat of paint while we had the room apart. 

And one important piece to note - the closet in this room contains some of the very last of the original paint from when we moved into the house. That's right - it's crazy turquoise! And you can't tell in the photo, but it's also high gloss paint. If you every wanted to see your reflection in turquoise, this closet was the place to do it. 

I weighed grey paint options, and landed on Sherwin Williams Argos. But when I painted a test patch, it looked blue. And with our robin egg blue curtains, I immediately knew it wouldn't work. 

So Chris suggested I mix in some black paint we had on hand, from painting the back of our fireplace a few years back. Since this experiment would cost us exactly $0 and might make the paint I had purchased for the walls usable, I decided to give it a try. 

So I mixed it in and rolled our new and improved paint onto the walls. As it dried I brought in my fabrics, to test it out. And unfortunately while it was definitely darker, it was still more blue than grey, and clashed with my aqua curtains.

So I bit the bullet and selected new paint - this time Sherwin Williams Dorian Grey (4th down on the swatch). A quick errand and $45 later, we were ready to roll again. Pun intended. 

And while I was a bit bummed about the dollars wasted on my first paint color, it did still work as a first coat, so only one coat of our second grey was required to cover the walls. The photo above shows the difference between the colors - my darkened Argos above our final color of Dorian Grey on the bottom (with our old room color along the top trim - Sherwin Williams Baguette).

And so we painted. We're still re-assembling so more photos are coming soon with the final wall color and a few other updates we made while we were at it.

Oh, and about that closet. It benefited from some extremely enthusiastic child labor. Thanks, Annabel!