the nursery diaries: part 1

I loved reading Erika's nursery diaries series over on Urban Grace several years ago.  So I thought I'd do the same with our nursery decorating projects, except we'll just have to pretend like all of this wasn't going on a year ago, okay?

We knew the old office/ man room/ junk collection was going to be the baby's nursery.  I have a theory that all married couples have that ominous third bedroom that literally serves no purpose (except for parental comments on how "it should really be a nursery by now") until a baby comes along to fill it.  Our first order of business was to clean everything out and repaint the walls. 

I knew I wanted to incorporate fabric from Caitlin Wilson Textiles and immediately fell in love with the coral & mint chinoise pillow cover.  Honestly, I also knew this was going to be on our 'splurge' list.  But I felt like I could incorporate the pillow cover and a couple yards of the coordinating coral fretwork fabric and still stay within our budget.

I wanted to keep the walls relatively neutral and found the perfect shade of pink, with just a hint of yellow, in Benjamin Moore's Opal.  In some light, the walls don't even look pink but more of an off-white.

{via}

In one weekend (while I was out of town, I might add), my sweet husband took our walls from this:

To this:

We also quickly realized that the large doors on the closet took up valuable real estate, given the room they needed to swing open. So in that same weekend, off came the doors!

Jeff also added some new shelving and hanging rods, and he used a level to draw straight lines down the closet wall.  The next weekend, I covered the lines with Frog tape and painted bright blue/green stripes to match the mint color of the pillow. (Note: be sure to remove the tape while the paint is still wet to prevent any peeling!)  It was a small space to add stripes, and the little painting project was much easier than I anticipated.



Up next?  Some Craigslist furniture finds and thrifty decorating!