Baby Grace's Room

Are you ready for the big reveal!? I sure am! I've been itching to show it to everyone for a while now, but wanted to wait until it was all done. (I guess it's technically not "all done" because we still need to put all the furniture in there. But this is just about the paint, and I'm certainly not waiting for all the furniture!) :) I'm super duper excited at how well this room turned out. I don't think of myself as "creative" or a "designer" and so I'm just amazed that I picked a design, chose colors, figured out how to do it all, and it actually turned out looking nice!

I've already posted a few of these first pictures, but I wanted to record the whole thing start to finish.

The plain white room.
Lily watching Jim start on the green.
The green around the window.
The pink...
This was Jim's extent of painting. He helped with all the background stuff, but the circles were my department, and then he came back in for the last step.
So the circles were a source of debate for a long time. At first we were going to paint them, then we found these decals that we thought would work, but then we weren't sure how well they'd stick to a textured wall, and then we weren't sure how the colors would match, but then we couldn't figure out how to make circle designs to paint. So we went back and forth about a hundred times. Finally, we decided to paint them, but we were going to use contact paper and make a stencil and try doing it that way. But the thought of trying to make good circles and hope that the contact paper wouldn't take the paint off the wall and that whole situation was a bit too overwhelming. So I finally decided to go ahead and draw a circle and free-hand paint the circles. So to draw the circle, I attached a string to a thumb tack, and the other end to a fabric chalk pencil. I stuck the thumb tack where I wanted the middle of the circle to me, was careful to hold the pencil at the same angle the whole way around, and drew the circles. And then I spent a couple of hours every afternoon for a week or so painting circles.

Here are the first of the green circles.



Once I got two coats of green on the green circles, I started on the dark pink accent circles.




And the final step took place last night: the chair rail. Since these pictures were taken in the evening, the lighting is different and the green doesn't look quite as bright for some reason. But you get the idea, and I really like how the white chair rail gives it a nice finished "polished" look.



We also had to think hard about what to do when the chair rail hit the window. Would we make the chair rail low so that it ran into the window sill? Would we turn the corner with the chair rail into the window frame? Would we paint the window sill to match the chair rail? We finally decided just to put the chair rail where we wanted it, and then taper it at a 45 degree angle where it met the rounded corner. It ended up working well!
So there you have it! Once we get the blinds up and curtains (still need to figure those out) and the furniture in place, I'll show you those too. It won't be long, either, because Jim has already stained Lily's big girl bed and his next step is to stain the dresser we bought for her to match and then put polyurethane on both. I love it when a plan comes together! :)