Quite a few months ago I decided to paint what was supposed to be a playroom for our coming baby and other future children. After I got it started, however, I ended up making it the nursery instead. We live in a pretty old farmhouse that has been added on to a few different times over the years. Our upstairs consists of three 'bedrooms' and one smaller room which is used for storage. Two of the rooms were somewhat remodeled by previous owners, leaving one 'bedroom' and the storage room left as is. I chose to paint the less than stellar looking bedroom for the baby. I wish I would have taken a before picture so you could see just how awful the room actually was. It was painted white, probably years and years ago, but was an off-white nasty color. There were brownish/yellowish water stains on some of the walls, that were ridiculously hard to paint over, from when the room used to leak. The carpet was less than eye appealing, but I didn't want to spend the money to replace it, as we plan to build a new house in a few years down the road, so I needed to cover that up a bit. This is the finished product!
Here is a run down of what I did...First, I painted the entire room with 2 coats of kilz. The areas with the water stains I had to paint 3 or 4 times before it was good enough for me. Then I had to draw out my clouds with a pencil. I did not use stencils or anything, just took a pencil and drew puffy clouds. Next, I used some leftover blue paint from painting my bathroom to paint the sky, making sure to paint around my clouds. I only did one coat of the blue because I figured since it was the sky it didn't need to be perfectly blue in all areas! Once I was done with that, I painted the wood trim grass green and also painted long wispy grass above the trim. There is not an art to painting grass...just a flick of the wrist is all you need. When all of the painting was done, I put some fun stickers on some of the walls, including flowers, birds, an owl, bunny, squirrel, nuts, mushrooms, and butterflies. I also had the coolest tree sticker just off to the right of the crib where the 2 pictures are hanging now...but, turns out my walls weren't smooth enough and it fell down and made a mess. I ended up having to throw it away :( I bought an 8x8 green area rug to imitate grass, had Trav's grandmother make a yellow curtain to imitate the sun, and then arranged the crib, changing table, dresser, and cube shelving. As you can see by the photos, there is no closet in the room, so I found a nice garment rack and hung up baby Zoey's growing wardrobe in the corner by the window. All in all, for a little bit of work and not a lot of money...roughly $425 to cover the costs of all the paints, sticker decals, area rug (just over $200 alone), changing table, picture frames, cube shelving, canvas storage boxes, garment rack, material for curtain, light fixture, mattress pad, and green crib liner, I was able to transform an old, practically unusable room into a cute nursery for Zoey! Everything else seen in the pictures were given as gifts! The only task left to do is hang up the wood letters that spell out Zoey's name. Can't wait until the weather warms up so we can actually get some use out of the room! It's currently been too cold, since we are too cheap to heat the upstairs!
