Around the holidays, Cutting Edge Stencils contacted me and asked if I would be interested in reviewing one of their stencils. Since I was already a fan and own one of their stencils, of course I said yes! Problem was that we hadn’t yet started the nursery and I wanted to stencil the ceiling. Thankfully, they told me I could hold off on my review until I was ready and I chose their Polka Dot Allover Stencil in the small scale size.

Fast forward like, 5 months. We ended up taking much longer than expected on the nursery and after painting the ceiling a dreamy blue, I decided that I didn’t want to stencil it. I focused my stencil attention on the green closet instead.

It took us a while after we painted to get to the closet, but this week I was finally able to spend some time on stenciling. Cutting Edge Stencils sent me everything I could possibly need to tackle this…. the stencil, a foam roller, a brush and a level.

The stencil also came with detailed directions, which is how I realized that I was supposed to remove the stencil from the shipping tube immediately and store it flat. Whoops. But, like I said the other day, I flattened it with some books for a day or two and it was fine.

The directions stated that you could use spray adhesive to stick the stencil to the wall. Since I started this at night and didn’t really have an open space to spray it, I decided to just use Frog Tape to stick my stencil to the wall. Please excuse the mixture of night time, day time and iPhone pictures for these in-progress shots. I had to work on this over 3 days in small increments because you know, I’m kinda really pregnant at this point 🙂

Yeah I taped the heck out of that first stencil. Since I started in the bottom corner of the closet, I decided not to use the level. It snapped on easily and worked well, but I quickly learned that the closet is not at all level! The baseboards are uneven, the side of the wall gets more narrow at the top and the level showed that it was slightly off. So I just started by lining the stencil up with the baseboard, as close to the corner as I could get and then just aligned the rest of my stencils based off of this first one.

For my method, I first started with the brush. I just personally prefer holding a brush rather than a roller so I dabbed some paint on the first two rows of dots. It was looking a little sponge painted, so I decided to try the roller on the next rows. Here is the difference between the two finishes.

I decided to go with the rolling for a more consistent paint application. You can also see from the above picture that my stencil is not completely touching the wall. I was worried this would be a problem with bleed through and that I would need the spray adhesive but it did not cause any problems! Once I rolled over a dot, the pressure applied pushed the plastic stencil flush to the wall for a clean line.

The absolute key to this process? Don’t overload your roller. I did two very thin coats of paint on each dot– too much paint at once will cause bleed through.

Once it was time for the next stencil, I just overlapped the top row of the stencil I just did with the bottom row of the one I was about to start.

I also gave it about 5-10 minutes between moving the stencil so that the outside was not soaking wet with paint when I peeled it off the wall. Mostly to protect my shirt, since my belly protrudes and pulling the stencil off made it smack into my body. It also gave me a break in between rolling. I even had Mike do most of the repositioning and taping so that I got a good 15 mins between each rolling session. I had no issues whatsoever with paint being on the back of the stencil, so I didn’t have to worry about it being completely dry when I moved it.

The halfway point (6 sheets of stencil)…

I repeated sheets like this until I got to the point where I could no longer fit a whole sheet. Then, I just overlapped the amount of dots I needed to get as close to the corners as I could.

Once I got to the top, I only needed an extra row of dots to hit the ceiling.

So I aligned my stencil with the existing dots and only had to paint the top row.

Then, I was all done!

Before…

After!

The stencil was really pretty much fool proof to use. My dots came out clean with minimal effort. This particular stencil was extremely forgiving when it came to aligning and overlapping areas.

The dot color is the same paint as our trim in the room– Olympic’s Crumb Cookie in a semi-gloss finish.

I’m so happy that I decided to stencil the closet and I can’t wait to see it with the closet organization system all in. Hopefully that piece that we’re missing arrives soon so we can get this all settled and packed with clothes!

Special thanks to Cutting Edge Stencils for sending me the stencil, roller, brush, level and inspiration. I would definitely recommend their stencils to anyone interested, the options they have are seriously endless and droolworthy.

Repetitive disclosure: I received the supplies necessary for this project in exchange for a product review. All opinions expressed are 100% mine.

Please excuse my absence today, I’ve been working on finishing this up…

I’ve discovered that my threshold is 6 full sheets of stencil a day, which is 270 dots, which is what you see above. After that I lose steam and need to stop, even with Mike doing the aligning, taping and removal for me. This giant thing makes it hard for me to move in a small closet…

Tonight I even poured a tray of paint in my lap, while sitting on the floor, without even realizing it. So I did what any helpless person would do and screamed for my husband, who supplied me with paper towels, helped get me off the floor and washed my paint covered pants for me. Oh and I got paint all over my feet in the same incident and proceeded to walk around the nursery. It was wonderful.

So this is taking me a little longer than expected, but I am determined to finish it. I’m going to have to do a little less typing, a little more painting and hopefully I can finish it tomorrow. Stay tuned for more pictures and details!

You know how sometimes things have to look worse before they look better? That seems to be the case with our nursery progress as of this weekend.

(Sorry pictures are a little blurry today, it’s rainy out and I took them this morning before putting my contacts in. Whoops.)

We set out to conquer a bunch of things on our to-do list. Mostly, we were all set to make the closet pretty. We originally talked about our plans for the baby’s closet here. I know I’ve mentioned that I plan to stencil the closet, but I don’t think I’ve exactly explained the plan. It will be white polka dots.

So the majority of the mess in the nursery? Pieces of the closet system.

We started to put pieces together only to discover that we’re missing a screw… literally. Mike called Allen + Roth and they will be sending us a new piece, but it can take anywhere from 1-7 days. Whaaamp whaaamp. Slight setback, but that’s okay because the closet has to be stenciled first! Which brings us to clutter cause #2…

I got all ready to stencil on Sunday with the supplies that Cutting Edge Stencils so kindly sent me way back in December. The problem was that it took me so long to actually stencil and I left the stencil rolled in the shipping tube it came in. So it was way too curly to use and I had to let it sit for a few days.

Holding down the stencil are some books and a fan we picked up for the room this weekend. It seems to be working and is pretty flat at this point. Hopefully I can tackle that in the next day or so. Until then, the ottoman is home to directions for both the stencil and the closet system.

The crib has become a catch all for the storage bins that will eventually find a home in the closet.

But the good news is that we did get a lot done overall. Those two little outfits are all washed for the hospital. The dark gray one is my first choice (complete with gender specific hat and blanky) and the chevron one is a larger size incase I have a big baby. I decided to go with a gender neutral outfit because the baby is usually all blanket and hat in the beginning anyway and the gray looks so nice with both baby pink and blue 🙂

We also assembled most of our gear this weekend and it has found a home in the corner of the nursery.

We tucked this stuff in here because the last time we left something in the family room this happened…

Don’t worry, the bassinet pad hadn’t been washed yet. The stroller will be in the garage so Macky won’t get used to free rides… not that I pushed him around the family room in there or anything. Okay I did. I considered it quality control.

Finally, you may have noticed the giant elephant frame in the room. We made a trip to Ikea this weekend and picked up a frame for our alphabet print over the dresser.

I started my maternity leave today, so I’m hoping to wrap most of this stuff up this week. I probably won’t stick to my usual posting times, since well, I can post whenever I want now!! Though I’ll probably stick to weekdays since that’s when Mike works. I decided to take last night off after work so I could celebrate by sitting on the couch with a giant bowl of ice cream. It was fabulous 🙂

Confession: I love lettering, typography, whatever you want to call it. I’ve known forever that I wanted to make some sort of alphabet art for the baby’s room, but I put off actually making something until I had a better idea of the space. Now that we have the elusive glider and ordered a bookcase, I know that we can add a mix of pieces to the wall over the bookcase (which has not yet arrived…)

Which means I can finally decide what to do with the space on the other side of the room, above the dresser. Mike talked about our adding some framed art here, but now that we know we can add a TON of frames to the space above the bookcase, I’m leaning towards one giant artpiece.

Of course I don’t have a head-on picture of the dresser, on the wall it’s staying on, that includes the height of the ceiling. But you get the idea that the wall above the dresser is a giant blank slate.

We’ve waited to install our giraffe sconces until we were sure of where we were putting the dresser. Which meant we had to have the glider. Which we just got last week. See how everything comes back to that damn glider?

Now we know we can install our giraffe sconces over the dresser like our inspiration picture…

(Honey & Fitz via Centsational Girl)

Then in the middle, I want to add some giant, horizontal alphabet art. Like this…

(from Free Home Decorating Ideas via Pinterest)

Or like this…

(via Project Nursery)

I’m partial to styles that have multiple fonts, sizes and are not perfectly aligned. Like this one…

(via Project Nursery)

Or this…

(via Etsy)

Or even patterned like this one…

(via Area Fare)

You notice how all of those last 3 have blue in them and 2 out 3 also have green? That’s for all of you people who have tried to tell us that you know we’re having a boy because of our nursery paint choices. Muhahaha.

Up until last night, I figured I’d draft something using a couple of different fonts, then paint the final product on canvas. As I fiddled with Photoshop last night trying to do that fancy mock up of our new bookcase that I posted above, I realized that we can just design something in Photoshop and have it printed on canvas. This would save me a TON of time and be a lot more fool proof than my free handing. I looked up the prices of printing on canvas using Kodak Gallery and was shocked to see that it would be about $150 for a 24″ x 36″, which is about what we would want.

So I went back to doing it myself, when Mike reminded me that the last time I went to Michael’s to buy a canvas that large, they were super expensive too (even with 50% off sale). I do know how to stretch my own canvas, which is always an option, but then I would still be freehanding the letters. Humpf.

Then I thought of just doing a print in a matted frame. I decided to see how large of a print we could order and I was shocked to see that they come as large as 20″ x 30″ for just $20! I checked the Ikea website to see how large their frames go and it seems as though they sell them pretty large. We’d probably want the finished product, meaning the outside of the frame, to be around 24″ x 36″. Ikea notoriously has awkward sized frames, so I think we’ll pick up a frame first. Then we can see how large the opening is and plan a print to fit the opening. The whole thing– print, mat and frame should run us about $50 and would be less tedious than painting by hand. Though I need Mike to be in charge of the Photoshopping magic, I am still a rookie and what takes me 2 hours takes him 2 minutes.

We’ll keep you posted on our progress (though not the specific colors we’re using just yet!). Hopefully the logistics work out and between the 2 of us, we can whip up something awesome 🙂

ps- My last day of work is Monday. Let’s hope the baby gives me a full week to wrap up all of this nursery business!

The last time you saw the nursery, the furniture was arranged with the glider in the corner.

Oh and there’s a Mamaroo temporarily in the other corner. We just put it together and wanted to make sure it worked. The point is, there’s a giant empty wall next to the glider.

I was waiting to have the glider to decide what type of furniture to put next to it. I wasn’t sure if we’d want a small table, toy storage, bookcase, etc., but I knew we’d want something to use as a surface to put down bottles and other things. Then we realized how small this room was getting with everything in it…

I had the glider positioned on the right side of the window…

So I just slid it out to the other side of the window.

The good thing about this is now we can get a small bookcase that will be closer to centered on the wall, but still next to the chair. Then we can fill the wall space above the bookcase with a nice gallery wall or something similar.

We measured about how large of a bookcase we’d want after moving the chair. The ottoman does stick out into the room a little bit more now, but there’s still plenty of space to navigate to the crib. As the baby grows, maybe the configuration will change.

I searched the Ikea website and saw that the only short bookcase they had was the Expedit, which I wasn’t crazy about in this room (though we have a black/brown one in the office). I turned to Target and quickly found the Carson 2-shelf bookcase.

(via Target)

The image on the Target website isn’t great, but you get the idea. The dimensions worked, plus I was able to get free shipping and 5% off for using my Target debit card. Since the image wasn’t great, I wasn’t yet sold and turned to Google, where I discovered that this was just the shorter version of this bookcase that Jessie from Cape 27 has that I blogged about last year!

(via Cape 27)

Which of course got my wheels turning further…. not only should I buy the bookcase, but I should paint the back of it green like the nursery closet!

It would look a little something like this…

So I ordered it. It will be here early next week and will make a nice home for some books, a humidifier and a gallery wall 🙂