Working on the Nursery

Even though we JUST found out the baby's gender, we'd been working on the nursery for some time already.  We both knew that, boy or girl, we weren't going to want a very gender-specific space for the baby, so once we passed the first trimester and things were going smoothly, we started to look at paint.

First of all, here's the before.  This picture is from when we did our home inspection and the last owners' stuff was still inside.  For the past year almost we've been using the room to store a couple pieces of extra furniture and it came in extra handy as a second guest room when Andy's parents and brother were visiting.  We used to call the room the princess room for obvious reasons:

We still need to do something about the ceiling fan...

Pink is not my favorite wall color, so we were excited to paint.  We went to the paint store and picked out three shades of green and eventually had to go back and get two more because they all looked a little...minty.

The colors don't show up well here, but they're all actually pretty close to each other.  We ended up going with the one in the bottom row on the right, called rainwashed.  Here's a link to the color on Sherwin Williams' website so you can see it better: Rainwashed

We got the whole room painted fairly painlessly about a month ago, and it looks SO MUCH BETTER!

As you can see, the room has become a dumping ground for all things that do not fit elsewhere in our house.  Pretty soon a bunch of this stuff is going to need to find a new home!

So once the paint had cured for a couple of weeks, we decided to get artsy and put these birch tree decals on the wall that I bought on Amazon.  The process was kind of daunting, but ended up being an easy weekend project, or really something we could have done in one day had we not decided to start in the late afternoon.

First we cut out the pieces.  It's important to have as many people in the family watch you as possible.

Even Andy's Paddington Bear, who he is passing down to the baby, was observing me.

Isn't that blanket pretty?  We got it in the Aran Islands on our honeymoon in Ireland!
It matches so well, and completely by accident!

Then we laid the trees flat on the floor.  Check out that rug - $50 at home depot! Such a good deal and super fluffy!  I wish it was a little bigger, but the next size they had would have been wall to wall carpeting in the room.  I think once we get all the furniture in the room, it will be plenty big.  Also, it was only $50.

Once we figured out how we were going to put them up, we went right to it!

The first tree was probably the hardest...

 ...but before you knew it, they were all up on the wall!

The next day we went for the branches and other accents (birds and leaves).  They were a little easier to manage than the giant tree trunks.

Voila! The finished product!

Here's a detail of the birds over the doorway, which I really like.

They aren't sticking perfectly because our walls are slightly textured, but we found that putting a little clear craft glue on the edges helps with any lifting.  The smaller pieces are sticking better than the trunks.  Mostly I love that it was an easy project, they look great, and they're temporary, so when we get sick of the trees we can do something else.

Last night we ordered our crib from Target, who is doing a free mattress with crib purchase promotion, which saves a lot of money.  My email says they should be here by the middle of the week, so I think I know what we're doing next weekend!

Now that we know we're having a girl, we can start accessorizing to make it a little more gender specific, but we definitely won't be going pink crazy.  We found an artist online that does great graphic prints that should go really well with our foresty/nature theme, and I also have some cool craft projects I found on pinterest that I may try fairly soon.  Obviously I will share them on the blog.  I feel like we're pretty ahead of things, but I also know she'll be here before we know it!