The Big Mural Reveal

Tah-dah! Say hello to my new jungle friends:

They are all plagiarized borrowed from various internet art sights that have been repeated so many times that I don't have a clue of the original source (if you search for "cartoon monkey" "cartoon parrot" etc. these are some of the top hits). And of course I added a few personal touches.

Here's a pictures from farther away, so you can see it more in the context of the rest of the room (see the grass down at the level of the wood trim?).

Let me briefly tell you about these two pieces of furniture too, since you can see them. We followed our normal process for furniture shopping: 1) check Ikea first and find some things we like, but decide we should branch out; 2) look around at other furniture stores and discover that we hate most other styles and the few that we do like are incredibly expensive (i.e we did not like the cribs sold at Buy Buy Baby and Babies R Us but we did like the ones at Crate and Barrel and Pottery Barn for, literally 6 times more); 3) check Craigslist and other used sites for used versions of the expensive furniture that we like; 4) eventually give up and buy at Ikea.

So the crib is Gulliver, in birch. The dresser - because we could not find a changing table we liked - is Mandal. It's actually the same furniture line as our bed, which we thought would give us some nice flexibility when we inevitably rearrange what goes where. Our bedroom and the nursery now share the same birch and white (and, for that matter, blue and green - though in very different intensities).

And our last reveal for the night - fishies! I extended the mural into a small underwater scene inside the window cubby:

Mural tease

Pictures of the nursery are still under lock and key until I can surprise my parents with it in person next week but I just have to say:

THE MURAL IS FINISHED!!!!!

The mural took almost two months and was a lot of work and may end up being the first thing to get painted over when our little baby is old enough to have opinions, but you know what? I don't care. It makes me smile when I look at it and makes the room feel special. And oh yeah,

IT'S DONE!!!!!!

Yes, I'm excited. I obviously wouldn't have done it if I didn't enjoy painting, but I'm really not much of a "process" person. I enjoy painting, cooking, baking, knitting, etc. because I enjoy the final product. So as much fun as it was to paint animals on the wall, it's must more fun being done and getting to look at it and not hate it (because that was a distinct possibility).

And it's not a moment too soon, because I learned yesterday after a particularly busy day out and about on my feet that I have reached the stage of pregnancy where I grow cankles if I'm not careful about sitting down and elevating my feet. No more climbing up ladders and painting for hours for me. Because as of today, (one more time):

THE MURAL IS DONE!!!!!

Garden progress

In an effort to avoid sharing our progress on the nursery so that my parents can be surprised when they visit in a couple of weeks, I thought I'd catch you up on the state of the yard, since it's been a few months since we last checked in.

Some flowers of what I can only assume are from the "wild flower mix" are blooming:

One of our fancy red tiger lilies made an appearance. The flowers closed up and looked dried up and dead each night and then came back each morning. The leaves came up on the other side of the walkway but never sprouted any flowers.

Our Asian lilies were big and dramatic:

We actually had a surprisingly robust strawberry crop, considering this was the plant from last year. We put the planter in the breezeway and largely forgot to water it all winter, and yet it came back happy. The chives in the same planter came back too. This, basil ,and parsley (and the thyme and peppermint that we have in the ground), are our only homegrown items this summer. We couldn't be bothered with the ones that take more effort like tomatoes or cucumbers.

After none of the bare root black-eyed Susans we planted last year came up (I really have bad luck with bare root plants), I got impatient and bought some full-grown ones at Home Depot. Hopefully they come back up next year. This is my second attempt at buying full-grown black-eyed Susans. To be fair, the ones that I planted a few years ago accidentally got gobbled up by the rototiller when we were ripping up liriope, so I can't really blame them.

We planted a small plant that we bought at a county fair, called Strawberry Seduction Yarrow. It turns various shades of red and yellow:

Our butterfly bushes, while still puny compared to some, are growing a lot more than they used to.

 And they're living up to their name:

One hydrangea plant is thriving (relatively) and the other right next to it, not so much:

But we got enough from the one plant to convince me that it was ok to cut some off for our table (usually I hate to take flowers off the plant, because I want to continue to enjoy them outside in the yard where they won't die as quickly):

And my clematis finally made it's way up to the top of our lamp post! I've been trying for years to get a climbing plant to get there to no avail...until now!

Largely, this summer the garden has cared for itself. I'm seeing far less liriope than previous years, meaning that we finally made progress in ridding our garden of the horrible grass infestation. Plants are coming back - and coming back happier than in previous years. The grass in the front yard stopped looking stellar once the weather turned hot and dry. The back is doing pretty well still. This has led us to conclude that we might need to stop using a shade/sun mix in the front and switch to full sun. I always consider our light "dappled" but the grass has other ideas. So this fall when we do our annual compost spreading/overseeding (by "we" I mean D, since being so pregnant by then buys me a free pass), we'll try using a different seed blend.

But lest you think we're not continuing to work hard at keeping things looking nice, take a look at what we set out for pickup not too long ago:

So yes, even with all the nursery decorating, we haven't forgotten about our curb appeal.

Cutting it down to size

J's old desk chair was obtained from some random big box store. It's a wobbly ill-shapen mess that has become increasing fragile due to the over-use of cardboard in its construction. We've kept it for so long for a simple reason - J's desk is a very odd height. It's counter-height, but with a drawer below it. So, it's effectively halfway between a counter-height chair and a dining room chair. Which is not a common height.

During our many trips to Ikea to pick out baby furniture we found that the new Ikea INGOLF was, at least by eyeball, about the right height. So we bought it, figuring that if it was too tall, we could always cut it down.

After bringing it home and building it, we found, of course, it was about 2.5 inches too tall.

So, out came the mitre boxes, rulers, tape, pencils, and wood saws. First I taped off the legs (hoping to reduce splitting of the veneer when sawing), then I marked off 2.5 inches from the bottom of the feet on all sides. It was tricky because the legs are curved.

I then got the bottom of the leg at a right angle to the side of the mitre box. Just with some eyeballing. I was very concerned I would be cutting the legs off at an odd angle, but I didn't have a good idea how to cut it to precisely 90 degrees. 

I had two wood saws, with about the same saw tooth shape and size. But one only got through about 1/8 of the leg with 60 seconds of furious sawing, while the other got through the entire leg in less than a minute.

Did this three more times and was relieved to find that the chair was mostly level, despite my sloppy measuring and cutting. I then chamfered the bottom edges of the feet with a Dremel, so they would be less likely to split in the future.

The boss approves.

Little Details

No additional mural progress - real life, vacations, work, etc temporarily took over. But I should be back to that soon. In the meantime, sharing a few other small touches we've added to the room over the last month or so.

We painted the insides of the shelf nooks blue. It will be a lot darker when we put the top shelf back on - for now it almost looks like a different color on the top and bottom shelf (it's the same paint - just the sun is hitting the top shelf), which now makes me wish I had thought to do that myself. My plan is to paint little fishes in there.

We painted the attic cubby doors with magnetic primer and chalk board paint:

We rolled two coats of a very well shaken and stirred Rustoleum Magnetic Primer (seriously - the instructions even say to have it professionally shaken and then use immediately, since it takes very rigorous stirring and shaking to get the metal pieces distributed through the paint) followed by three thin coats of their chalkboard paint. It's tintable to a lot of fun shades but we specifically wanted the classic chalkboard gray look.

A lot of reviews said that the magnetic primer wasn't very effective and, indeed, it doesn't seem like it will be able to hold up alphabet magnets or anything heavy. But it can hold up a sheet or two of paper with a pretty strong (but not necessarily "super strong") magnet:

I should mention that the "we" here really is just D. Both these paints are most definitely not low VOC and they reeked of stinky fumes. I kept away and we aired the room out for a while before I made my way back in.

And finally (for now) we ordered these adorable elephant switch and outlet plates off Etsy - further making me think that elephant curtains might start to be a little too much...

Furniture is on the way and more mural work is coming. Stay tuned!

Happy Little Clouds

You'll have to bear with me as I continue to go on and on about the nursery. We actually have some fun yard pictures to share too, but I'm on a roll here and excited to show you all our progress.

First an update on the Curtain Poll - if you haven't voted yet, please do. I have to admit I went into the whole thing almost sure of which fabric I liked best. And it isn't the fabric you like best. And while I reserve the right to choose mine over yours, your convincing arguments are changing my mind (for the record, I like the blue and green elephants, so it was still a popular choice). I think the simpler design of the yellow stripes might be the way to go.

Next onto the good stuff. My cloud dream has come true! After a few hours dragging the ladder around the room and dabbing on paint, I have a pretty sky ceiling.  I read a lot of how-to guides on the internet and it turns out there are about as many "how to paint cloud" websites and strategies as there are clouds. There is no standard set of colors, tools, or techniques. So I picked a few ideas I liked and got to work.

Step one, for me, was mixing white and the blue ceiling paint to make a subtle base layer. I put this on gently and sparingly with a large, very dry brush. It was so pale that I thought it would be helpful to mark the clouds with painters tape, but the tape kept falling down anyway, so I gave up on that strategy. Right away, I ran into the small problem of deciding which way to orient the clouds (most clouds in the sky are at last in part parallel with the horizon, but of course I had no horizon). I decided to have them all sort of face different directions, with a vague orientation towards the sun lamp in the middle of the room.

 After step one, this was the very subtle result. I let that dry for a little while.

An hour or so later, I was dabbing on pure white paint with a sponge, for the highlights (i.e. where the sun would hit the cloud). I think the fact that the ceiling is a flat paint and the white is a semi-gloss also helped the clouds stand out. I didn't take a picture of this step but basically it made it a lot easier to see the clouds and gave them some depth.

That took a little a little extra time to dry, since it was a little thicker than the first layer (but still not "three-dimensional" - I tried to apply very little paint so that there was no actual texture that would one day complicate an attempt to repaint the ceiling white).

Finally, the third layer was a little bit of gray mixed with white (I actually used Sherwin William's Knitting Needles, our living room paint, that has slightly warm undertones). I dabbed this below the white highlight areas for shadows.

Here's the final results, taken with D's much better camera and much better skill than the two pictures above:

Love love love it! The ceiling isn't as blue as I would have liked (this picture actually makes it look more vibrant than it is) but the whole effect is probably much better this way - much more subtle. Now that it's done, I find myself staring at my own bedroom ceiling thinking how boring it looks....maybe time to add a few happy little clouds?

Curtain Poll: Your Turn to Play

My mom ("grandmom") offered to make us curtains for the nursery, which is really exciting since there are not too many curtain choices out there that we like. So we walked around the aisles of Joann Fabric to see what struck our fancy. I came back with a yard each of four different fabrics and now I'd like your help deciding which to choose. Time for my readers - all 5 of you - to give me your opinions! Take a look at the four choices below and then fill out the poll at the end of this post. If none of them speak to you, choose "other" and let me know a different design that you think would be perfect. The nice thing about using fabric instead of ready-made curtains is how many more choices there are. So if you can describe it, it probably exists.

We haven't begun to deal with style of curtain and whatever we choose will have a backing to block some of the light (but not all of the light - don't want baby to only be able to sleep in a pitch black room), so don't consider those two things when picking.

The choices:

1. Yellow with a very subtle white design on it (mostly invisible from far away)
2. Pink and brown elephants against a blue background

3. Blue and green elephants on a white background
4. Yellow and white stripes

Here they all are again, in close up:

See anything you like?

Which fabric for our nursery curtains?

Yellow with white pattern

Pink and brown elephants on blue

Green and blue elephants on white

Yellow and white stripes

Other (please leave a comment)

free poll

A promising start

I got over my fear of messing up our freshly painted walls and finally got started. The semi-gloss has other ideas, however, and is proving its effectiveness. It would seem that it's so resistant to marking that it is nearly impossible to paint over top of it. But I'm stubborn and wouldn't let a little thing like that stop me. I used the brown right out of the can and just slapped it on for coat number one. Without any other tones, it looked so flat. The green was still visible through the brown and the brush strokes were there (a symptom of painting onto the glossy wall). On the other hand, it was easy to wipe away mistakes quickly.

An hour of watching paint dry (actually, of watching TV downstairs) and I was back up for a second coat. This time, I mixed the brown with beiges and grays, to give it more depth. The second coat also created much better coverage. I'm not sure if this picture captures the difference between using one color versus several - the top branch and trunk already got the layered treatment, but the bottom branch has not - it looks much more boring and 2-dimensional.

I decided to hold off on getting on a ladder to do the green foliage, since I was home along, so I turned next to Mr. Parrot. I had to do the same double coat, slapping on the primary colors once for coverage (and, since I had bits of white and gray on Ms. Giraffe on the right, you'll see I put down the first layer of her eye and tongue, making for a rather ghostly scene).

Another hour or so and then it was time for some textured feathers. You can see that I added in some orange, tinted some with white, added red to the blue and vice versa. Nothing particularly crazy, no shadowing or realistic texture, but I think it's a good compromise for a cartoonish look.

I was wrapping up the parrot when D came home to admire my work. He also suggested something incredibly obvious and yet so ingenious - if one coat wasn't adhering to the paint, why not prime first? And so I present to you my primed giraffe. That was where I called it quits for the day, so I don't know if it will help. But after seeing how poorly the yellow, more than any other color, covered up the green, even two yellow coats after priming will be better than what I would have faced without the white background.

(Don't look too closely at the fabric in the window - that's for the next post. I know, I know - "don't look" is a surefire way to make you look, even if you didn't look at it the first time.)

Jungle Fever

No no, not that kind of jungle fever. I mentioned that we were going for a jungle theme in the nursery and even though the colors are already definitely beginning to evoke a jungle look, that wasn't good enough for our baby! My plan, from even before we were expecting, was to make an attempt at a mural. The room already had one before we painted over it, so the idea was in our heads right from the start:

We've always liked the idea of wall decor and even have this vinyl up in our bedroom:

I didn't want to do a vinyl in the baby's room. First, because it was a huge pain to apply, with having to carefully push out all the air bubbles for such an intricate design, and second because they can be peeled off and if we had any decals low to the ground or otherwise in reach, what two-year-old wouldn't want to pull them off the wall and try to eat them.

So painting was the best choice. I'm no stranger to painting - way back in high school I actually liked art, and have plenty of not-too-horrible acrylic on canvas paintings to prove it. In fact, I even helped paint a mural on a wall of a store once, so this should theoretically be right up my alley.

First step, find inspiration. Not a problem thanks to the internet:

(Now you're starting to see why the green backdrop?)

Second step, figure out which walls to work on (and since we don't have furniture yet, I had to think ahead to where the furniture will likely go to avoid painting something and then covering it up with a wardrobe or chair) and sketch out a design. Notice the random notebook page? Yeah, that's because I drew this while in a meeting at work...nothing like multitasking!

Third, find some fun characters as more specific inspiration. I was going for cartoon, not realism, so I needed the internet to help yet again:

And a late addition (not in the original sketch) to fill out the wall with the window:

(Yes, I realize that giraffes don't live in the jungle with monkeys, but search for cartoon jungle animals and you get all kinds of not-quite-geographically accurate ideas. And you know what? It's for a baby, so whatever.)

Third, (and this is the most incredible, though it is kinda cheating) - have a friend offer to loan you her projector, which will let you project the pictures directly from your computer screen onto the wall so you can trace them in pencil and create an outline:

I had to fiddle with the furniture height and distance from wall to get the design exactly where and what size I wanted it:

 There's Mr. Monkey, on the wall for me to trace:

 Ta-dah! Can you see it on there? It's pretty light but the pencil lines are definitely in place:

Repeat that with the parrot and the giraffe (oh, and of course there's a tree but I free-handed that) and you have a complete mural ready to go.

The last thing stopping me was paint availability. I needed quantities greater than you can buy in an art tube but less than the gallon or even quart that they sell at most paint stores. And paint samples usually use sub-par paint. So I spend about a week strategically planning how to make the mural with minimal colors (thank you, basic understanding of mixing paints) and a trip to my parents to raid their used paint collection, before hitting Home Depot to pick up three 1-quart cans of Behr Premium Plus Ultra (way cheaper than our Sherwin William's default and didn't seem too bad): yellow, dark brown, and dark green (Flame Yellow, Ancient Root, and Pine Scent, to be specific). Between those, some free samples of Valspar's summer palette I got from Lowes thanks to some coupons in a magazine, and the other colors I have around the house, I should theoretically be able to get everything I need.

So why can't I get started painting?