Pepper Design Blog

Project Nursery: Inspiration Board

Project Nursery is well underway – we have four weeks (if babe decides to come on his/her due date) to button up this space and I’m all too anxious to get it finished.

The gender-neutral color palette is tan, brown and red with splashes of aqua, yellow and other bright, cheery colors. We decided to work with darker furniture since we were planning on incorporating an already owned dresser (Craigslist find) and Expedit bookshelf (Ikea). Here’s a rough idea of what I envision:

Nursery breakdown:

1. We were gifted this very comfy Stork Glider and in order to save that nearly-white fabric (as well as add pattern to the space) I’m hoping to create slip covers in an aqua print. That way I can pull the covers off for a quick wash should spit up or other fun liquids find their way onto the cushions.

2. A fun, bright lamp like this one from Cape Cod Brass would be a great addition.

3. I’m loving these soft pastel prints by Thibaut, Dandi and Serena & Lily – they would look lovely as curtains, bedding, fabric book pouches or as a valence in the room.

4. Back in May I made over an everyday Expedit bookshelf from Ikea by adding fabric to the backdrop, it has now found a new home in the nursery!

5. Vintage accessories in the form of rocking horses, wood blocks and prints are timeless and full of character – I’d love to weave them into this space.

6. With so many recalls and warnings out there we chose our crib through careful consideration and after much research. This Babyletto is a 3-in-1 (grows with baby), is environmentally sound (sustainably harvested wood) and passes all safety standards (non-toxic finish, lead & phthate safe, JPMA certified and tip proof) plus it’s extra wallet-friendly (considering all of it’s features)!

7. While most of the furniture has a contemporary/clean lines look, I’d like to add this Jenny Lind changing table to mix things up. Maybe with a coat of paint?

8. The biggest dilemma of designing this room? The rug, actually. I really struggled with what pattern of rug to shop for – with our new striped wall a striped rug felt a bit over the top, and without knowing baby’s sex, patterned rugs screamed too feminine or too masculine. When I found this burnt orange/red rug on eBay by Pottery Barn, I fell in love. It was a solid, bright pop of color made of soft wool that was comfy enough to crawl around on and sturdy enough to last years. Then I was outbid of my budgeting range (and the rug is discontinued by PB) so I’m back to square one. Do let me know if you see something similar! We might have to find a more neutral option soon…

9. Animal decals on the walls would really liven up the space, Inke from the Netherlands has the neatest selection of vintage wallpaper options but I think this would be a fun DIY project too! (Thanks to Kelsey, a reader who emailed with the source!)

10. I love the idea of fabric storage bins to organize toys, blankets and even laundry. These animal-themed bins by 3 Sprouts over at Layla Grayce are adorable! If I can find a neat way to build my own out of canvas bags I just might take this on as a DIY project too…

And there’s the space! Let the shopping/assembling/crafting begin. Here’s a quick link to the other Project Nursery posts: Inspiring Rooms, Striping an Accent Wall and the Before Pictures.

PS Don’t forget to enter the Tiny Prints (for adorable Holiday cards and other invites/announcements) giveaway! Ends tonight!

Project Nursery: Inspiring Rooms

My usual decorating process goes something like this:

1. Collect inspiring images into a folder on my desktop (over days or months)
2. Identify and pull from those images what resonates with me from each room (maybe a beautiful chair or wallpaper pattern)
3. Compile an inspiration board of furniture & general aesthetic from the images
4. Use the inspiration board to inspire colors and patterns
5. And finally DIY and search out components of the board until the room is complete, tweaking to incorporate great finds and changing tastes

Try as I might, I’ve gotten as far as step 2 for the new nursery over the past 8 months (yes, 8 months!). That darn room has changed so many times in my mind that as soon as I’m ready to commit I change my mind again.

But here’s a look at step 2. Here are the images that have resonated with me over the past year for this reason or that:

It only adds to the conundrum that the room has to stay fairly gender neutral until baby comes. We’re both excited to wait for ‘the big surprise’ but it’s difficult to build a design concept that doesn’t inch too much towards masculine or feminine.

I’m pretty certain the basic colors will stay in the neutrals (white, tans, browns) with splashes of red accents. From there, baby blues and yellows can build up a more colorful backdrop and I’m excited to use a decent amount of playful patterns in various fabrics for crib bedding, window valences (to corral those three awkward windows), curtains, pillows, fabric decals and the like.

Here I go, back to the drawing board. If I don’t have a pretty descriptive inspiration board to help guide my choices I end up doubting and returning more than I’d care to admit! Laying out pattern and color choices in advance makes for a fun design process – and pulling all of the pieces together is always my favorite part.

Stay tuned!

Inspirational rooms from above: Ohdeedoh, Samantha Pynn, 6th Street Design School, Ish & Chi, Isabella & Max and others from months and months ago…

Project Nursery: Stripe it Out

This past weekend was busy busy! Anxious to catch up on some much-needed nursery time, we dove head first into the room and began ripping out everything that needed replacing (read more about that and see the before pictures here). Out went the built-in cabinets, out went the light fixtures and off with the old, cracked window moldings.

While the inspiration board for the nursery isn’t quite finished yet… we knew that we wanted a bright and airy backdrop for the entire room and decided that the walls would be painted a light light neutral.

Hopefully these paint swatches don’t show up as too pink or too yellow on your computer screen – we were down to five neutrals when we decided that with the type of light that comes through our North-facing windows, the above off-white-with-a-tinge-of-tan should do the trick (for reference, we chose Believable Buff at 50% by Sherwin Williams). It was one huge lesson in never judging a paint by it’s swatch in the fluorescent lights of a hardware store, I probably drove back and forth ten times!

To keep the walls from becoming to bland, we thought it would be fun to add one striped accent wall along the most prominent stretch of the room:

Inspiration: Samantha Pynn, BHG, DecorPad and below, The Lettered Cottage

Keeping it soft and subtle was key here – we were working in the world of whites & tans and this is a close example to what I had in mind:

And so the room received a full covering in Believable Buff at 50%, and the stripes were filled in with Believable Buff at 35% (odd, I know, but I kept playing with the right blend at the Home Depot counter and I’m sure the paint man was going crazy).

Too keep the fumes from baby and me, Kevin was a sport about painting the entire room. Then he let my Mom and I stripe out the one wall once the room had been well ventilated, then he painted again.

I used tutorials from Centsational Girl and Young House Love (great suggestions!) to help guide the project, but ultimately walked away with a few tips and tricks – as well as lessons learned – of my own.

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{DIY: Striping Walls}

a
Materials:
*A gallon of paint to cover the room (or two quarts if you’re tackling just one wall)
*A quart of paint in the contrasting color (one quart per striped wall is a good estimate)
*Level
*Painting tape (we used Frog Tape)
*Ruler/measuring tape/L-square ruler
*Pencil
*2 people (very helpful!)

1. Paint the entire wall your base color: for us this was the slightly darker of the two shades (since the rest of the room was also the darker color). Let dry for several days to avoid pulling up paint when you attempt to remove the tape in the last step.

2. Take time to pencil your lines: Measure your wall from ceiling to floor and divide the entire wall by the number of stripes you’d like to paint. Ours was 100″ high, so we broke the wall into ten 10″ stripes. While many of the tutorials I read suggested using a measuring tape to mark out your lines in various positions on the wall, I found that ultimately a level and an L-square ruler worked best for our old house. Because the walls and ceilings weren’t perfectly level/straight to begin with, we initially measured out the wall in 10″ increments and then used our level to connect the dots across the wall with a pencil (without the level, our lines began to look like they were sloping upwards).

2. Tape: Tape off your pencil lines by taping along the top of one line and then the bottom of the next (so that you ultimately end up with full 10″ stripes in each alternating color). We had heard great things about Frog Tape and gave it a shot, we definitely liked the results.

5. Seal the tape edges: This is a critical step and will save you much heartache! Seal the edge of the tape that marks off the new stripe color by painting it with a quick application of the current or base wall color (purchase a sample size of your current wall color if you didn’t start from step 1). Now, when a bit of paint bleeds through the tape, it will be the current wall color and not your the color of your new stripes – which would leave a jagged line.

6. Fill in your stripes: Apply two coats of the second stripe paint color between the wider tape lines.

7. Peel off tape: Next crucial step! Remove the tape shortly after applying the second coat so that the paint is still decently wet. If you wait until the paint is dry, the tape is more likely to pull up the below layers of paint and cause peeling and rough lines.

Perfect back drop for baby’s room – I love how the stripes are soft and neutral, it’s a nice accent but not overwhelming. Now on to the windows, light fixtures, floors and inspiration board!