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!

At this point in my short blogging life, I have uploaded over 1,400 pictures to this thing. With nearly 200 posts, I’m beginning to forget what I’ve written about, what I’ve photographed and what pictures never actually made it to the computer. Yes, my memory cards are currently housing something like 8,000 pictures. I’ve heard many people who maintain blogs say this and I shall repeat, the picture part is the most time consuming. For every one picture you need to post, you take like 10-15 and choose the best one.

Since I am a weekend warrior, sometimes I am so inspired on Saturdays that I take a million pictures and think of a million blog topics. Then Monday hits, as well as “real life” and sometimes I just don’t have the energy and can’t even remember what I was planning to say. The short summary to all of this rambling? Sometimes my projects fall through the cracks.

Back in March/April when we were working on the office full steam, I took on a little project that I forgot to tell you about. It involves this guy.

Yes there are two different sizes of gumballs in there. When we replenished the stash we bought the wrong size. Whoops. But anyway, we received this amazing gift from Mike’s brother and his wife about 5 years ago. We love the the novelty and unexpectedness of it. I have always adored gumball machines, especially the giant one from Family Double Dare in the early 90s. Remember? No? It’s okay I found a picture!

(via)

Everytime I see Mark Somers on the Food Network it just feels wrong. Also in the 90s, way back when I was in elementary school, I remember seeing a girl who was dressed as a gumball machine for Halloween. I was so jealous because it was obviously the coolest costume out there. It looked like this, but with balloons for gumballs…

(via)

Some girls aspire to wear lingerie and animal ears, I aim for a garbage bag and a sheet. I think that explains a lot…

While we loved our gumball machine, we thought that it was time to give him a makeover. So I (very nervously) disassembled him.

Taped off his important parts…

Then I sprayed him. I sprayed him bright green…

I understand that he is likely not food safe at this point. We never really ate the gumballs from him anyway. I imagined a green machine with bright white gumballs. He took a while to dry and when I removed the tape, I discovered a little mishap.

My taping missed a few spots around the metal (the red on the plastic piece where the gum comes out is actually printed there). I planned to touch this up with some acrylic paint in the closest match possible. I knew I could never spray it any closer than I did!

It seemed genius, perfect. And then I put it in the office.

Not so bad, but then I stepped away.

And away some more.

Then Mike and I declared this project a flop. Maybe not a full and complete flop, but we don’t like it. The green is too John Deere, which is funny because they sell John Deere spray paint and I purposely avoided it. With the addition of our white chairs, we decided another pop of white in this little corner would be perfect. Actually I think I sprayed this the same day we bought our chairs, so yes, it took me nearly 4 months to post my failure. Not because I was keeping it secret, but because I wanted to report on a final product before posting.

I bought some high gloss white spray paint soon after this mishap, but then life got crazy and the last few months have been a blur of coffee, textbooks and Pinterest. The office still looks exactly as it did in the pictures above, but maybe I need to conquer a small project to satisfy my painting itch. Can of white spray paint? I’m coming for you.

That is of course, after I pull the 4 foot weed in my front yard. Yes neighbors, we still live here….

…Wait do my neighbors read this? Hello, is that you guys? Yes, this IS why I stand in the yard with a camera and run away when you spot me!

Since the weather this weekend is supposed to be this…

I’m hoping to finally get outside to play with this…

And even some of this…

I bought this spray paint a while ago, but because of cold, rain and being busy, I haven’t had a chance to use it. I’m hoping to spray some office accessories this weekend, as long as the weather cooperates. I would tell you what I’m spraying, but I am slightly nervous to take my beautifully traditional things and make them funky with glossy green spray paint. It is either going to be a brilliant idea or a complete disaster.

Good thing I have this blog to publicly humiliate myself if this doesn’t work out, but I have a feeling I’ll be just fine 🙂

Mike and I were busy bees this weekend, working away at finishing our office.  I have lots of good stories to tell of trips to Ikea and long overdue purchases, but it’s been a very long day!

My rough day was made much better when I came home to see that some fabric samples I ordered from Fabric.com had arrived. How did I not venture into online fabric shopping before?? I am in love with all of the possibilities! Here’s a little sneak peak at the first round I am considering…

I think I have a front runner and seeing this picture has given me even more ideas. I love seeing different patterns together like this, especially when designers make it easy for you by matching the same colors in a bunch of different styles! I am just learning to venture out with patterns and textures, so the online option takes some of the intimidation out of the way. It’s like a whole new wooooorld! Cue the Aladdin! Wait.. more about that tomorrow…

Did I just pull a teaser? Maybe 🙂