Ellie's nursery: the paint

Since Ellison's room is not quite finished yet with the craft projects I'm still working on, I'm just going to talk a bit about her paint.  I knew from the get-go that I wanted to do a neutral color on her wall.  I've heard from several people that have done pink on the walls that it makes it VERY hard to match anything else that might be pink her room.  Then I went back and forth about doing something really modern and bright.  But in the end, who knows if this will be my only girl.  And my only chance to embrace my love of pink and do something soft and feminine.  So, a neutral tan/gray for the walls it was, but accents of pink everywhere else.

I saw these two images on Pinterest and knew I wanted to use them together in some way.  I love the idea of painting something in the same color, just a different gloss like this.  At first I was thinking stripes, but we just did a stripe in Owen's room.

And while I LOVED this nursery, I didn't think I was brave enough to do another color on the wall.

So I combined both of these ideas!  I bought the stencil from Cutting Edge Stencils.  It's a great size which felt a little less daunting.  I watched tons of videos from craft blogs on how they did more modern stencils and got some good tips.  Then we painted the room 2 coats of an eggshell paint.  And the stencil arrived.  And I realized it was the reverse pattern of what I thought it would be.  Meaning, if I just put the stencil on the wall and painted in gloss, the large open areas of the stencil would be glossy, not the lines.  Which is what I had envisioned.  Does that make any sense?

So, long story short, I decided to paint the wall in the gloss and go back over it in the eggshell.  The first coat looked terrible, so we had to do another one.  Have you been counting?  When all is said and done, the wall behind her crib has 5 coats of paint on it.  Ridiculous.  I really need to be less OCD.

 

Once the gloss paint was dry, it took a week of nap times to get the stencil done.  I'm not going to lie and say it was easy.  Stenciling is not for the faint of heart (especially the edges) and I'm super glad I was painting the same color, because there are tons of mistakes.  But in the end. . .I LOVE IT!  It's just enough whimsy on the wall without being overpowering.  You can barely see it at times and then the sun hits it, and you can see it perfectly.  And since this room will likely have to stay the nursery because of it's size, it's only one wall I have to repaint if the next kid is a boy!