Nursery Redo

It's done! We've been wanting to do something really cool with the 2nd bedroom for our little Henry for a little while now. We've just had to nail down exactly what we want to do, prep it and execute it. So we went and bought our paint last Monday, but didn't have the time to do more than that until Friday night/Saturday.

 We decided we wanted to do stripes and a solid color, divided by a chair-rail moulding that would sit at the height of the crib. It's also worth noting that I mostly came up with all of these elaborate plans, but because I can't be around paint fumes, I did...nothing to implement those plans. I asked for the moon, and Jeff went and got it for me. :)

So here's what the nursery looked like before:

Jeff first put on two coats of yellow from the ceiling down to about a foot above the baseboards and let it dry.

Isn't he so sweet?

I had to get some shots of him making funny faces.

Very very silly.

Next, on Saturday morning our friend Kyle came over with his cute little girl to help Jeff paint the horizontal stripes. I watched the baby while Jeff and Kyle painstakingly taped off the stripe lines. They used a wall-mounted laser level that we got at Home Depot for like $30. You'd think that once they lasered out the lines and taped them that everything would flow smoothly, but you'd be wrong. One of the quirks of living in an old house is that the ceiling isn't necessarily level with the baseboards. So the guys had to decide to make the stripes perfectly parallel with either the ceiling or the floor, because they couldn't do both. The whole stripe-taping process took about 2 hours, which is disproportionate to the size of that teeny room (aprox 8ft x 11-12 ft). Once the taping was done, though, the painting went pretty quickly.

Our friend Kyle helping out.

After the painting was all done, the only thing left was the chair-rail moulding. This ended up being the most difficult part of the process. Jeff and I went to Home Depot to cut the pieces of moulding that we carefully measured for at home. The way that Home Depot goes about this is kind of a joke. You have to cut everything yourself without any guidance or direction, using unfamiliar and dull tools. So, being the assertive person that I am, I walked myself over to the contractor's desk and explained that we needed help. They tried to brush me off by telling me that it was a self-serve deal, but I told them that I understood that, but we needed help to know how to do it ourselves. So they called over this guy who was super irritable and condescending. He pointed out that there are directions on this paper at the station, but we had already read those and they were beyond unhelpful, so I told him so. Then he demonstrated how to make cuts so that the pieces would fit together like a picture frame...which we didn't need, so that sucked. We couldn't even really ask him to fix it because he was already really put out about having to help us in the first place. So we did our best to just figure it out ourselves. Unfortunately though, with pregnancy brain I've lost most of my capacity for spacial reasoning, so Jeff was on his own. Once we got home we realized that we'd made the cuts wrong, so Jeff had to go back to Home Depot and start over.

At this point, it was closer to 7pm and I went to the adult session of stake conference with a couple of friends, so Jeff was on his own again. Luckily, our friend Nate was available and helped out. So they go back to Home Depot and make new cuts, then try to stick them up on the wall. This is when Jeff realizes that not only are the ceilings in our apartment really goofy, but the walls are also goofy! They're kind of out of control, actually. They bow out from the level plane that walls usually stay within. So while Jeff was measuring the length of the walls from the baseboard (like a normal person would), what he really should have been measuring was the wall itself. So when he came home with the second round of cut mouldings, the pieces were too short (cue groan). After this, he finally decided to stick with the pieces that we had and just buy a miter saw and miter block so he could cut little fill-in pieces rather than buying all new mouldings for the third time. He worked SO HARD on this room! By the time everything was said and done he had spent 10 hours working on that room and made 4 trips to Home Depot. Here's what it looks like with the mouldings in place:

Looks great, right? Isn't Jeff amazing?!

I also went to the Bijou Market on Saturday and picked up this little beauty for the nursery:

Isn't it so precious?! It's from a local artist who also has an etsy shop and showcased her beautiful art at the Bijou Market. I'm completely enchanted by this print and I feel like it's perfect for Baby Henry's room.

So now all that's left is the furniture! My Mom is bringing the crib down from Logan this Wednesday (my parents took us to pick out a beautiful crib for Christmas), Jeff will be setting up his new standing desk tonight or tomorrow, we'll get the dresser (which is a project I'm really excited about undertaking-there will be a whole post about it, I promise!), and add the finishing touches. I'll keep you posted on all of them!

But what do you think of our nursery so far? Good start?