Nursery: Furniture

While Peter was painting my mom and I were by no means laying around. We were busy working on furniture for the room. We already had a shelf to put in the nursery and a few weeks ago Peter and I found a dresser on Craigslist that will serve as a storage piece and changing table.

If you read any decorating blogs, surely you have heard of Annie Sloan's chalk paint. My mom has been using the paint for a while now (she's even trained to teach others how to use it). She is always raving about how easy the paint is to use. It goes straight on without any need for priming or sanding!

By painting our two pieces of furniture the same color I like to think we created a set. For the dresser, we needed to update the hardware so my mom and I headed to Anthropologie. We found new hardware that was very sweet and very pricey.  Rather than replace all of the hardware on the dresser, we decided to only replace the hardware on the middle three drawers and simply spray paint the hardware on the other six. A fresh coat of navy spray paint freshened the hardware for just $2.50. The Craigslist dresser was completely transformed by the paint and new hardware.

As for the yellow shelf, three coats of paint drastically improved the look. I've always loved our yellow shelf so I had a hard time imagining that it would look better but man, oh man, does it ever!

Nursery: Paint

Last weekend my mom came to visit. We worked on the house for hours and now I'm knee deep in plans for the house which I will  be knocking out before the baby comes. Word is, the arrival of a little one has a way of postponing even the best laid plans.

Since Peter and I aren't going to find out the gender of the baby we're doing a gender neutral nursery. Two of my friends already had gray nurseries, one for a boy and one for a girl, so gray seemed like a good gender neutral color. After perusing the internet for further inspiration,  I found few more gray nurseries that I loved so we decided to go gray.  In the hunt to find the perfect shade, I picked up over twenty paint cards from different companies. By last Friday, I'd narrowed that group to five. When my mom arrived she helped us narrow it down to the final two colors: Behr's Sparrow and Anonymous. After throwing some samples on the wall, all three of us were sold on Anonymous. It's a warm gray that still offers the drama of a darker color.

Peter very kindly took Friday off so that he could paint. He is a gifted painter and I like to tell him so.  Come December he will have painted every room in the house save one (of course, that room is the smallest so it hardly counts).

By the time he was rolling the walls it was obvious that Anonymous is the perfect gray for the nursery. Certainly it is more gender neutral than teal.

Thirty-six hours and two gallons of paint later, the painting was complete. Now the walls will serve as the perfect canvas for the rest of our nursery projects.

In A Fortnight