Painting the Nursery

Frank and I decided to go with a Safari theme for the nursery. I found inspiration from a nursery posted on Design Dazzle. I took the colors used on this site and we tweaked them a bit to find colors that we liked. After a few weeks of picking colors, we finally decided on the ones we liked and I set to work priming the room which was a blue already. Here are a couple of before pictures:

Frank had a bit of fun with some of the colors we decided not to use. We are definitely replacing the carpet now that he has added a splash of orange and green to it! The room previously did not have an overhead light. Frank installed the wiring so that we could add a ceiling fan and light. We have not picked out a ceiling fan yet so he just put a light fixture up for now. Last weekend I primed the room and last Wednesday night after work I put up the base coat for the two walls that would have stripes on them. We picked a khaki/cream color for the base. Friday, Elizabeth and Charlie flew into LA and spent the weekend helping me do the strips and solid walls. I am so happy Elizabeth offered to help! The stripes would have taken forever to do alone! We spent 4 hours Friday night drawing the lines and taping. Here is a picture of the base coat of the cream color and what the wall looked like after we taped Friday night. We ended up running out of tape twice throughout the weekend! We used 5 entire rolls by the end of the weekend.

We started the painting of the stripes Saturday morning and by 2 pm we were done with all but 1 stripe color. We painted the green, orange, and light brown stripes but had to leave the light brown to dry before we could add the dark brown stripes. It was extremely satisfying to pull down the tape after completing the stripes!

While waiting for the paint to dry and since we needed a break, we went out to dinner with Charlie who was itching to get out of the house. He was such a trooper while we taped and painted! He even did a little taping of his own for us. After dinner and bath time for Charlie, we started taping again for the dark brown stripe. While Elizabeth worked on painting the dark brown stripe, I taped the two walls that would be solid green. Then we called it a night and relaxed for a while. First thing Sunday morning we finished up the solid walls and pulled all the tape down. We were both thrilled with the finished product.

I am hoping to get Frank to add crown molding around the ceiling and we still need to pick out new carpet and the ceiling fan. Now begins the search for furniture! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you Elizabeth for all of your help!