I’ve left the 20s and entered a new leading digit.

I also switched to a maternity shirt this picture, which just fits so much better than the non-stretchy one I was squeezing in before. The next time I do one of these series I’ll be sure to start with a super stretchy shirt as opposed to a baggy shirt with not much stretch.

Now that I finally look super pregnant and the elderly women in the hair salon told me I was cute when I walked in (even without makeup and in baggy sweat pants), I feel a little sad that this is almost over. Though I am well aware and anxious that I will soon have an adorable baby I’m dying to meet, part of me is like holy crap, how am I 3/4 done already?? You wait so long to not feel sick, then to have a normal looking bump and then… it’s almost over.

Here’s to hoping the next 5 weeks treat me well– I get some good nights of sleep, my ankles stay manageable most of the time and I’m able to enjoy my last 1/4 of pregnancy.

Saturday morning we headed to Lowe’s to pick up our paint for the nursery. We went with the colors we decided on last week.

To keep things simple since we were walking in with 4 different colors in 3 finishes, I wrote what we needed on each color we wanted.

Yes that is my iPhone shadow. It was inevitable.

Anyway, the colors are Crumb Cookie in semi-gloss (trim & paneled wall), Lettuce Alone in eggshell (closet), Comes The Dawn in flat (ceiling) and Gray Beard in eggshell (walls).

We painted the ceiling in about an hour on Saturday night (after getting haircuts, buying paint, caulking and attending an engagement party an hour away). We loved the result.

It gives this infinity sky feeling– when you look at it you almost feel like you can jump in it and it never ends.

Then yesterday we started to paint the walls the gray color we chose… and this happened.

Yes, that’s it on the left (and there’s the paneled wall primed and partially painted!) But the gray paint looks like baby blue. Suddenly our modern looking neutral nursery turned into a Pottery Barn boy’s room. Not the look we were going for, so we stopped right then and there.

The problem is that the ceiling is reflecting on the walls, so the true gray is appearing blue. I went back to my pile of swatches and decided we needed something with some brown undertones, to counteract the blue reflection. We picked up a tester of Olympic’s Gray Goose and stuck it on the walls.

Definitely doesn’t look baby blue, but we’re not sure if it’s too brown. Or if it gives off a purpley pink undertone….

Here it is at the top of the closet, which I don’t mind so much. It definitely varies depending on where it is in the room…

I didn’t get a chance to see the new color in daylight since I got home late, so I’m going to check it out again tomorrow morning. It looks great with the curtain fabric and bedding (which I can’t show you) but I’m nervous about it with the charcoal colored glider we’re planning on getting. We have both brown and gray fabrics to mix in, so I wanted the paint to be a little bit of both. Like the bridge that brings the neutrals together.

I have a feeling the solution to our problems may be right in front of my face, like maybe, in our striped walls downstairs in the current office/future playroom…

We might have to dig out the leftovers of one of these colors tomorrow….

I went to Lowe’s tonight to pick up a few paint chips for the nursery. We have plans tomorrow night, Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon and I reeeeally want to get the painting done this weekend. Which means that we need to decide on colors by Saturday morning so we can go buy paint, start to paint at night and hopefully finish it on Sunday morning/Sunday night. But I think I may be in over my head…

(please excuse the dirty floors in the nursery, no point in cleaning when we still have a lot of work to do!)

All of these colors are for Olympic’s No-VOC paint. While at Lowe’s, I grabbed grays pretty quickly (there never seem to be enough gray options)…

The greens were extremely limited…

And then I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of sky blue colors. Really, there were rows and rows of blues and I just stopped taking them after a while. I figured one of these has to work!

Yeah, so those are the “few” paint chips I was going to get. We started by looking at them in the kitchen, where we decided that we liked the big chips against the baseboards the most.

The white one is the actual color of our trim throughout the house– Olympic’s Crumb Cookie. I grabbed one of those chips just to make sure it blended well with everything else, considering our entire paneled wall will be painted that color. Granted it’s dark out and we’re dealing with a simple lightbulb in the room, but we decided that the blue was too blue and the gray was too dark. Back to the drawing board it was!

Our preliminary, night time choices are looking like this…

It’s really hard to get a true picture of paint colors with a camera… especially at night. I think the blue is coming across more blue than the comforting blue/gray that it really is, but I don’t think we’re too far off from the colors in our inspiration schemes.

Actually, according to my monitor, we’re pretty damn close! Originally I was leaning towards a more true gray color for the walls, but it didn’t feel right. It appeared a little bluish, so we gravitated back towards one with brown undertones. I’m slightly concerned about the glider we want being a charcoal color, but I held a similar color up against it and it looked fine. Hopefully everything still looks good in the morning so we can get this process rolling!

ps- I think there may be some paint chip art in my future 🙂