Sing it, you know you want to!  I am.  Blinddddeeddd by the liiigggghhtt. Bli-bli-bllllliiinndddddeedd.

We had a problem when we installed our diffuser-less light fixture the other day, just after we finished painting the nursery.  The bulb was insanely bright, like sun-spots bright.  I think Rebecca realized this when she caught me staring into the bulb  for a solid 15 seconds.  Her line of thinking was probably, “well if Mike stares into this thing for 15 seconds at a time, then baby will do it for 30 seconds.”  Not good.

I proposed putting the light on a dimmer.  At least with a dimmer, we’d be able to control the brightness.  But then we both realized that when this baby is crying at 4am, neither one of us will think, “oh hey, this light is on a dimmer, let me decrease the brightness before I pick up this crying baby.”  Yes, out went the dimmer solution.

The bulb dips just where the shade ends, so even if we wanted to make/buy/steal a diffuser, we wouldn’t be able to use one.  The bulb would literally sit on the diffuser and eventually we would have a nice fire in our house.  Great.

We begin thinking, I joked about putting in a black light far too often and then we thought, “restaurants often use silver tipped bulbs!”   Oh, if you were paying close enough attention, you saw our solution already in Rebecca’s last post.  But enough about Rebecca.  We headed off to our local Lowes.  No silver tipped bulbs.  We then headed to the Home Depot across the street.  After having the lady search for a solid ten minutes, no silver tipped bulbs either.  We gave up and decided the internet wins again.

We got home, pulled up Amazon and a couple seconds later we bought a 100W half chrome bulb.

Now these things aren’t cheap at almost $7 a pop, but they get the job done.  They fill the room with plenty of light and allow you to look at the bulb if your eyes should cross it’s path.  Boring, if you’re me, but safe if you’re a baby.  Baby 1, Mike 0.

And here is the bulb in all it’s glory.  The chrome actually looks a bit stylish.

At my baby shower two weeks ago, we learned that Mike’s brother and his wife secretly bought our crib for us, yay! Last weekend, they dropped it off and this weekend we finally had a chance to put it all together. In case you forgot, we chose the Stratford crib by Baby Appleseed for it’s solid wood, formaldehyde-free construction.

When I looked at the box, I was a little surprised to see this sticker on the outside.

First I was a little taken back. I had specifically emailed Baby Appleseed to ask if the crib was a) solid wood and b) formaldehyde free. They assured me that both were true. At first glance, this sticker makes it seem as though there are some non-solid wood parts and that the crib does contain formaldehyde (though it meets California’s strict emissions standards). I emailed them again (they must hate me by now) and asked about the sticker. I was assured that what they told me was indeed true and that the sticker is required by law and put on all furniture pieces. Now I can sleep a little deeper at night and be sure that I’m not lying to my blog readers about my solid wood, formaldehyde-free crib.

Anyway, back to the crib all assembled!

We love the way it looks against the paneled wall with the dark/white contrast going on.

And with the blue ceiling.

And the gray walls, which was a major concern when we were choosing a paint color. We’re so happy that everything is coming together the way we envisioned it.

The crib will probably end up pushed to the left so that we can fit a glider on the same wall. If that glider ever goes back on sale at Babies R Us. I’ve been stalking it daily and it hasn’t been on sale since we first spotted it! Anyone know when big sales are at Babies R Us? Best coupon times? Anything?? It was $450 for both pieces when I first saw it and now it’s $600.

Besides the glider, everything seems to be falling into place. I placed the bedding in the crib to see how it looked with the paint and everything and it looked great. I was nervous because it has brown in it, but the walls are grayish and I wanted to be able to mix the two neutrals well. Also, we bought a dresser this weekend and I’ll have to fill you in on that later this week. We are also debating our nursery light fixture since we found another one we like, but that discussion is still in the air.

On top of all of that, we’re still in the midst of our mower and mulch search and we came to a bit of a sad realization regarding our family room carpet this weekend. Let me just say that life with a cat who is recovering from kidney cancer is not fun nor easy, though he’s doing unbelievably well. I’ll fill you in on all of that once we know a little bit more.

In conclusion, things are not slowing down around here anytime soon!

ps- Anyone hiring cats? It’s about time these guys pull their weight around here…

Finally! Finally this weekend Mike and I finished painting the nursery. By finished painting, I mean we literally painted the walls, paneled accent wall, crown molding, baseboards and closet in a matter of a day. So I guess you can consider this post a paint reveal, a finished accent wall reveal and a completed crown molding reveal. Weeeee!

I guess I’ll let the pictures do the talking?

Wait, quick interruption already. We ordered a silver tipped light bulb to see if that reduces the glare of our diffuser-less light fixture. When we switch the bulbs out, we’ll be sure to rotate the shade so that the seam is not smack in your face when you walk in the door. Okay back to the pictures!

No post is complete without a photobombing cat. That’s Mowie, you don’t see her often and she thinks she’s finally getting a room away from her two brothers. Oh another note, the floors still need to be cleaned from all of the construction in here…

You probably noticed that we took the closet doors off. We’re planning on hanging curtains and installing a closet organization system.

Kitten tested, kitten approved! They’re loving the 75 degree weather we had today 🙂

Here’s a quick recap for anyone interested…

Paint Colors (all Olympic paints):

Ceiling- Comes the Dawn D52-2

Walls- Gray Ghost D17-2

Closet- Lettuce Alone B68-3

Trim- Crumb Cookie C20-1

How-To:

Paneled Wall

Crown Molding

Overall, we are very happy with how everything turned out. It took us a little longer than usual to settle on the perfect gray for the walls, but we’re very happy with our final choice (which is one of the colors from our office stripes!) Mike loves the green closet and I’m still adjusting to the bold color, but I know once it has a white wood closet system on top of it and some curtains it will be less of a solid green mass. Plus I am likely going to stencil it, once I do a trial run to confirm. Now it’s on to buying furniture and adding details! Fingers are crossed for smooth sailing from here on out… 🙂

When our house was being built, we opted for just some ceiling fan pre-wires in all of the upstairs rooms. Any additional lighting was ridiculously up priced and we figured if we wanted to eventually do recessed lights upstairs, we had access to our attic. Fast forward 2 years (ah, it will be 2 years since we closed in just 2 weeks!) and we’re now ready to use a spare bedroom as a nursery. And this is our light fixture….

I wanted a clean, modern light fixture in here. I’ve expressed my love for drum pendants before, but somehow I have not put a single one in our house yet! I figured I’d start with the nursery, especially since our first nursery purchase were some Jonathan Adler giraffe sconces which come with white shades.

(via Macys)

I have a gift card to the Land of Nod and I remembered that they had some affordable pendants, the Hangin’ Around Lamp.

(via Land of Nod)

The pendant comes in a variety of colors, including white, gray, brown, hot pink, lime green, navy and orange. So many of those would work in our room. After thinking about it a little, I decided white would be best. Then I decided that $99 (even with a gift card) was too much to spend for a plain white light. Back to the drawing board it was! And by drawing board, I mean google…

I googled a bit and then discovered this…

It’s a 15″ white drum pendant lamp on sale at Target for $23.99… and it comes with a lightbulb. Perfect size, nice, cheap and I got free shipping and 10% for using my Target card. Needless to say, it took me about 20 seconds to click the buy button. Unfortunately, this was over a week ago and it’s no longer available for me to link for you guys 🙁

Tonight we finally got around to hanging it. I would post a how to install lighting, but I was holding the light most of the time and Mike said it’s simple enough… screw in your metal bracket, cut the wire of the fixture to your desired length with pliers, strip the wires, match the colored wires of your fixture to the colored wires coming out of your ceiling, twist ’em together, tape them with electrical tape, screw cap on and I think that was it? I couldn’t see beyond the giant shade I was holding. Plus my calves kept getting cramps from keeping my balance. Standing is hard when you’re super pregnant…

Here are some night time pictures of our new friend.

It looks so nice and classy against the paneled wall.

And the sky blue ceiling.

One downside to the inexpensive option is that it does not come with a diffuser. The lightbulb is extremely bright and an eyesore (in multiple ways). I started googling around for solutions and I think we’ll try a silver tipped light bulb first. The bulb hangs low and I’m a little nervous to put any sort of material on the bottom of the shade. Though I found this Apartment Therapy post which says that a CFL lightbulb emits much less heat than a standard bulb, so creating a diffuser shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll probably try picking up a different bulb first.

I am dedicating this weekend to finishing up the paint job in the nursery. I just saw that we installed the paneled wall back in the beginning of February and March has been super busy for us. I am looking forward to having a full weekend to put into the room, especially since I need to take multiple breaks (and naps!) while working on projects these days. I have to accept that what I used to be able to do in 2 hours now takes me 4 and plan ahead for that additional time. Wish me luck 🙂

No that’s not the beginning of a bad joke, that’s how our adventures in finding the perfect shade of gray for the nursery could be described. If you remember, we started off with Olympic’s Gray Beard…

Which was way too light and way too blue for our taste. We rummaged through some of the 8 million swatches we picked up once again and chose another gray.

We pulled out Gray Goose and decided to (wisely) get a tester this time. But we put the color on the walls and it wasn’t what we expected…

It was too brown and had some funky purpley/pink undertones in the room. I scratched my head for a bit trying to think of what color we actually wanted. Gray was too gray, taupe was too brown… was I losing my mind? But then I started to feel like I’ve been down this road before in the search for a perfect neutral. I mean, most of our house is painted in varying shades of gray…

I had all of these shades of gray to look at right on our own walls. I thought our entryway color, the middle color in the top row, might give off the too brown/pinkish tinge in the nursery though it looks normal in the entryway. Then I thought that the first gray in the second row might be perfect. It’s Olympic’s Gray Ghost and we used it for the lighter stripe in our office…

By some sort of miracle, I stumbled upon the swatch while I was getting dressed in our closet on Tuesday morning. I apparently stash swatches everywhere and it was one of the neutrals we considered for our bedroom (which has yet to be painted). I immediately brought it into the nursery and held it up to the wall to see how it worked. I also held it up against the bedding, curtain fabric and my dark gray leggings which represented the glider we’re planning to buy. Everything looked promising, but since we’ve been there, done that (twice!), we wanted to try some paint on the walls. I figured we had to have some left over from the last time we painted but even better, we still had the tester we used a year ago (already!)

Mike put some of it on the wall and sent me pictures while I was at work (since I never make it home before dark)…

There is is on the bottom of the corner, with the Gray Goose above it and the Gray Beard in the background. It’s definitely much better than the other two!

You can see here that it doesn’t have that purpley/pink thing going on that the Gray Goose did.

Nor is it blue, which you can see from this picture where the Gray Ghost is on top of the Gray Beard. The testers only come in satin, hence the sheen in this picture.

After a journey through what felt like any color that Olympic started with the word “gray”, I think we have a winner! We don’t have enough paint leftover from the office to cover the entire nursery, so we have to pick up another can this weekend. Hopefully then the painting will be completed because this little set back has cost us a week of time!

Maybe rather than a bad joke, Beard, Goose and Ghost can make some childhood game. Like duck, duck, goose or rock paper scissors? I want to be a paint color namer when I grow up…