About a year ago, I pinned this picture on Pinterest…

(from Tar Paper Crane via Pinterest)

It got me thinking about painting our front door, which is currently the same brown color as our shutters (this is an old picture from the fall).

Then I saw this picture on Pinterest and I loved the blue door with the blue hydrangeas.

 (from House of Turquoise via Pinterest)

So I started thinking that color could work because we also have blue hydrangeas. I love them, so why not make them stand out a little more? Btw, look at how big they are now after just 2 years!

After teaching Mike what robin’s egg blue was, I did a little Pinterest search to find some more inspiration. Why not share, eh? Since I don’t have much time for projects, I spend a lot more time brainstorming and googling for ideas these days 🙂

#1. Love this blue gray color, so classy

(from Pink Wallpaper via Pinterest)

#2. We’ve even talked about putting some numbers on the door itself, sort of like this (I also love the door itself but buying a new door is not in the plans…)

(from House of Turquoise via Pinterest)

#3. This looks nothing like our house, but fabulous none the less

(from Katy Elliot via Pinterest)

#4. Nice and clean, and looking more like our door

(from Desire to Inspire via Pinterest)

I’ve been itching to spruce up our front porch (replace the lights, get a bench, do some cleaning). Why not add another goal to the list? We just started giving Easton bottles, so maybe once this heat wave ends I can spend some quality time out there. I mean, it’s been almost a year since I pulled a weed myself 🙂

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 🙂

What color will you paint?

This is a common question regardless of the room, but even more so since we are not sharing the gender of the baby. In fact, someone just asked me this question yesterday. I think many people have a hard time leaving the traditional nursery wall colors of pale pink, blue, yellow and green and often assume that our walls will be yellow or green. For people who don’t read my blog, I usually leave the answer at a simple “neutral walls”. For the rest of you, you get the long answer 🙂

First, I have always planned to paint the walls a gray/greige color. The panelled accent wall will remain entirely white. Maybe something like Benjamin Moore’s Stone Harbor for the walls…

I also mentioned that I wanted to paint the closet a fun accent color before we put our closet organization system in. For this, I think we’re going to go with a neutral, but still fun, green. Like Benjamin Moore’s Citrus Green…

I have also always wanted a fun painted ceiling. When I was a kid, I had baby blue sheets with clouds on them and always imagined my future kid’s room would have clouds painted on the ceiling. I really toyed with the idea of a mural, then a stencil on the ceiling, but I think I’m going to go with just a subtle sky blue color. I’d hate for a pattern to take away from the crown molding or paneled wall we just worked so hard on. Maybe something like Benjamin Moore’s Mediterrean Sky…

I know what you’re all thinking, I’m sure our parents are currently like OMG BLUE, IT’S A BOY!!!!! But shall I remind you that this was our plan from the beginning. I mentioned here that I wanted a multi-colored room and though I love the idea of yellow or orange, I tend to gravitate towards cool colors. I decided that I didn’t want to paint a ceiling yellow or orange and thought that the blue was such a nice soothing option for an area that a baby will stare at for so many hours. For those of you not convinced, girls can have blue ceilings too, see?

(via Young House Love)

Incase you’re not confused enough, here’s our targeted color scheme completed with our potential curtain choices:

If the baby is a girl…

And if the baby is a boy…

I absolutely love both of them. I thought I wanted a bright ceiling and closet but the more I thought about it, I decided the paint colors should be muted and more serene with pops of bold fabrics. We’re planning on using the chevron curtains on both the window and the closet, since they are extremely close to each other and multiple fabrics would be too busy. So that means that either of the chevron patterns would be against the green, as they are in the swatches. I have a chevron sample that I plan to bring with us when we choose paint colors this weekend. I will probably still scratch my head and be extremely confused, but seeing all of the colors together lessens the blow. Of course, we plan to buy no VOC paint as we always do.

So my short answer to my most frequently asked nursery question sounds a lot more boring than what we’re planning, eh? 🙂 I cannot wait to paint this weekend!

Have I mentioned before that I love Pinterest? Every single day something on there makes the little hamster in my head jump on his wheel and start running. I have never seen so many amazing things I would never think of on my own. I consider time spent on Pinterest as research and development time for the casa, which is even more important than time spent doing projects 🙂

I usually hop on Pinterest for a little bit after I finish my post for the night. Last night I spotted these fabrics and were instantly drawn to them…

(via, I always try to link to the original source, but the link in the pin isn’t working :()

When I look at them closely, I probably wouldn’t choose any of these fabrics on their own but the color scheme is glorious. It reminds me of Kerry’s new nursery and the pom mobile she just made…

So I was thinking, since my living room is taupey with blue gray shades, maybe I can incorporate a little yellow?

Liiiike, maybe in those bookcases I wanted to add?

(via)

I’d probably go with a softer yellow than in that image, but I was totally feeling this plan last night. Our living and dining rooms connect and our Target dining room chairs have a hint of gold in them. It would be a nice way to bring everything together!

And just for fun, here’s the view of the kitchen from the dining room I’ve never shown you. It’s from Thanksgiving time and was taken at night, which is why the curtains are drawn and I never posted it here.

So as much as I’d like to change it up, all of our rooms are fairly open. I definitely want to keep the living room classy, but I think I’d like to mix another color in. That is, until I discovered this picture also on Pinterest last night…

(via)

It’s a subtle color scheme, but not at all boring. It’s not overly matchy or themey either. After attacking the original source, La Dolce Vita, I found this close up image of those shelves back there…

Hm bold blue accent bookcases? Perhaps 🙂 Regardless, I am now totally inspired to take my living/dining room combo up a notch!