Our Happy Home ~ Painting the Nursery

I am sooooo excited about this next post... We finished painting the nursery!

I am starting to get anxious about prepping for Squishy's arrival. I am only 26 weeks and I am already feeling the pressure. Maybe it is because this pregnancy is going by so much faster. I have less time to sit around and think about the baby coming and less time to get things done. We have most of our baby supplies already but I really wanted to give the nursery walls a bit of a different feel.

Sydney's room is the only room in the house that is painted a different color and we wanted this baby to have the same thing. Because I am the only one who knows the gender, everything has to be neutral. Luckily every wall in the house is a soft grey so we had something easy to work with. In the end, I decided that doing stripes to coordinate with the already newly painted grey walls would be easier. 

Gender neutral rooms only really leave you with two options... yellow and green. Sydney's nursery was green so this one was going to be yellow. We bought the paint over a month ago and JUST got to tackling it this weekend. The photos are not great, but here is how we created our giant stripes.

The Supplies:

~ Paint (We bought a gallon because I originally wanted to do the whole room with stripes)

~ Brushes

~ Roller

~ Paint Tray

~ A very good painters tape (we used Frog tape)

~ A credit card or something like it for pressing down tape

~ Measuring tape

~ Level

~ Pencil

~ Chalk Line

The Process:

~ Measure your wall from the roof to the top of the base board

~ Decide on the number of stripes you wish to have on the wall and start doing some math. Our walls were 92.5 inches and I only wanted 6 wide stripes. After some quick math, I decided that the stripes would be just shy of 15.5 inches.

~ Measuring from the baseboard up, mark out your stripes. I made one mark on either end of the wall and one in the middle. 

~ Grab yourself a helper and using the chalk line, mark out the stripes using the measured markings. 

~ Carefully tape along the chalk line. Do not press down to hard at this point as you may have to move the tape. Also remember that you want to make sure the tape is on the correct side of your chalk line (the non-striped side) so that your stripes are equal width. 

~ Grab your level and walk along the taped lines to ensure that they are even and level. You may have to do some adjusting at this point but mine were fairly straight. 

~ Tape off the ends of your stripes

~ Using a plastic card of some sort, press down all edges of the tape very well. This will prevent most leakage.

Our walls all taped up

~ Once everything is pressed down and straight it is time to start rolling!

~ First, cut all of the side edges and along the ceiling with a brush

~ Start rolling the paint on in thin layers working from the outside edges in. The first paint layer should be very thin to avoid any leaking. 

After one layer... Sydney was kept entertained by Toopy and Binou on the computer.

~ Repeat the painting steps two more times each time ensuring that you are painting in thin layers away from the tape. 

~ Once everything is painted leave to let dry for an hour or two. 

~ Come back and remove the tape right away. The longer you leave the tape on the walls, the more likely that it will peel up other paint.  

David removing the painter's tape

~ Stand back and admire your work!

This makes me even more excited to get the rest of the room set up. It is going to be so amazing to have it all done!

Mrs. E