Baby's Room

This past weekend Nate's parents came up from Portland to help us paint the baby's room. The plan was to have the room entirely prepped with paint purchased so that the work could get started bright and early Saturday morning. That's not exactly how it worked out. During the week Nate had come down with a pretty bad cold, so the painting party was actually cancelled and we figured we'd get his parents up here another weekend to paint. So, while I'd picked out colors, we didn't actually go and buy any paint to paint the rooms. Then Friday evening came, and with Nate feeling better, it was decided that his parents would make the trip up here.

So here we are. It's Friday night, we have no paint, we have no food, and I'm exhausted. Sounds like fun, right? :-) Well, we make a trip to the paint store figuring that we for sure need paint in the morning and (figuring that we could make a donut or bagel run for breakfast) I can go to the grocery store while the guys are painting and pick up food for lunch. What ended up happening is that I learned a very important painting lesson at the painting store. Actually a few lessons.

Lesson #1 - Make sure you keep the paint sample testers of the paint you want and throw away the paint not selected. When your husband asks which one can be thrown away, really pay attention to this as you may inadvertantly have him throw away the incorrect can. This meant that when we went back to the store to pick out the real paint at 8:30pm on a Friday night I had one correct paint color sample and one incorrect paint color sample. As I have full pregnancy brain symptoms of late, and I was tired, I honestly couldn't remember if the 'light' color for the wall was the light color on the color card or the medium color.

Lesson #2 - When in doubt about the color, don't buy anything. I finally decided that the light color on the wall HAD to be the light color on the paint sample card and the dark color on the wall was the medium color on the paint sample card with 50% more color added. We got home and painted the two colors and I realized that I was very, very wrong. The light color wasn't a color I'd even selected as one of my paint tester samples. Oddly enough the medium color with 50% more color added looked like the light color on my walls. Yet, I knew (and yes, I was right) that the lighter color from the original tester samples was not the 50% added color from the color card but the medium color on the color card. So how does a meduim color paint suddently become a medium color +50% paint? That brings us to lesson #3.

Lesson #3 - If you want to paint using paint brand A you need to get a sample size of paint brand A paint. When I originally picked out my colors and paint samples I was told that the store was out of BEHR paint (which I wanted to use as it had the primer build into the paint) but that the Martha Stewart brand would give the exact same colors. So I got Martha Stewart based paint samples to test my colors. I went home, painted colors, picked out the two I wanted (after much debate) and 'knew' what to get when we went back to the store. Well, the picking out colors fiasco of lesson #2 I realized that the different in base paint made a HUGE difference in actual color on wall. The Martha Stewart brand paint went on darker than the BEHR brand paint. So whereas Martha Stewart paint required the medium and dark paints from the color card to get the look I wanted, the BEHR paint required the medium paint from the color card + 50% additional color and the dark paint from the color card needed an additional 75% of color.

Hopefully I haven't lost y'all in this painting extravaganza. Bascially it took three trips to the paint store to get the correct colors that I'd decided on two weeks prior due to the lessons learned as described above.

In the end I turned a very dark green and blue room into a light and airy tan and brown room. We (or I) decided on the light and darker brown with white trim theme because, not knowing what the gender of our baby is, meant I had to use neutral colors. Additionally, if we ever want to use this smallest bedroom as an office instead of a nursery it will be painted a color that makes sense for an office. Not a fan of having butterflies or baseballs in the office. :-)

A big thank you to Nate's parents for all the hard work (all the painting was finished in less than two days!) and to Nate for putting up with my indecision in decided paint colors.

Before picture - the dark blue and green colors are not done justics in this picture. They were MUCH darker in person. Imagine a dark cave that just happened to be blue/green.

A view of the newly painted room with just sunlight peeking in. LOVE IT!!!


A view of the newly painted room with the lights on and the sun at our front.

Soon-to-be Mom and Dad in the new room. Oddly enough this was one of three times I was allowed in the room while it was being painted. Nate was very concerned about me breathing in paint fumes so he wouldn't let me go in to check on progress but just a few times. The times I did get to peek in (which was only to give my opinion on colors) I had to leave right away. He still won't let me stay in the room very long as there's still a slight odor. He's such an awesome husband and dad-to-be!!!