Pepper Design Blog

Project Nursery: A Painting Party Weekend

I was looking forward to creating some pretty neat animal wall decals out of fabric or wallpaper for the new nursery (see the inspiration board here), but then I received the most wonderful surprise from Kevin’s mom and aunt. They offered to drive all the way from Phoenix to help paint the nursery just this past weekend – in any design that we’d like!

His entire family is filled with amazing artists and his aunt is especially talented as a professional home muralist (Palette of Possibilities). Because of the short notice and the gender-neutral theme, I stuck with my original animals and asked them to paint several zoo/safari style characters around the room.

They’re so talented! Here they are in progress:

They spent an entire Saturday from dawn until well after dusk finishing the room and I was so impressed with how fast the colorful animals came together. And then, just as quickly as they had arrived, they zipped away back to Phoenix leaving us with a beautiful nursery.

If you’re on the hunt for some easy-peasy not-so-hands-on mural ideas, here are a few of the resources that I love:

Jiving Jungle Pals fabric stickers by Pop & Lolli (completely reusable – just peel off and stick anywhere) are whimsical and adorable!

My Wonderful Walls has created a neat line up of wall stencils (such as the safari animals above) and they work with local children’s hospitals to help decorate bare rooms. Beautiful art for a good cause!

The original designs that inspired an animal theme for the nursery were these beautiful patterned wallpaper decals by Inke over in the Netherlands. Shipping might be expensive but it would be well worth it!

For more Project Nursery posts, click the Home Makeover button on the right sidebar. The nursery is almost finished!

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!

Project Nursery: Before We Moved In

As we get closer to the ‘big day’ (seven short weeks!) Kevin and I decided it was time to begin tackling the new nursery.

Little secret: I have trouble making decisions – it takes me weeks to pick out a paint color or fabric pattern let alone an entire room layout that’s full of all of the above plus furniture, etc – so deciding how to design the gender-neutral space has been especially tough. From colors to themes to styles… too many choices.

But we’re taking baby steps and and that includes tearing out all unwanted features of the current space. Here’s a quick ‘before’ of the room just prior to us moving in to the house two years ago (aka all decorating done by previous owners):

And here are the must-fix-before-we-even-begin-to-decorate areas of the room:

The most unusual piece must be the built-in cabinets topped with bathroom floor tile. They span a wall of the room and probably at some point in their life served as storage, but in a pretty unattractive fashion.

Second would have to be the floral carpeting. Not that brown floral rug which was moved out by the previous owners, but the green carpet underneath covered in rose vines. Wheerrrreee do you even find that?? The rug was pulled up before moving in and wood floors were revealed underneath, it was a close one though!

On the minor side, the light fixtures needed an upgrade and the windows ultimately needed replacing and new molding. Plus the fact that there were three of them in a row meant a bit of creative covering to keep the light out during nap time.

So mission number 1 is set: tear out built-ins, work on floors, pull out light fixtures and update windows!