Prepping...paint!

BEFORE

Continuing on our theme of "this is taking waaay too long", we painted the nursery!  Dillon and I chose a medium gray and got a decent deal on it from Sherwin Williams.  When you sign up for emails, you get 50% off of everything for the first month.  So we bought a gallon of Harmony paint, their "no-VOC" paint (Sherwin Williams also uses no-VOC colorants when they tint the paint- make sure you check on that too if you get your paint elsewhere) so that I could do the work with Dillon.  We had first purchased a $6 quart of the same color just to try it out and make sure the gray didn't read as blue when it was actually on the walls.  We struck gold the first time, so we got our gallon of Harmony paint for $35ish. 



Here comes the part where it took way too long.  Rather than feel silly for the mistakes we made, I'll just tell you the lessons we learned. 

1. take a long hard look at whether or not you will like the look of your scratched up and dented and scuffed trim BEFORE painting the walls.

Dings, dents, scratches.  What did those people do????

2. If you decide to paint the trim after you paint the walls (without removing the trim, of course), invest in the green tape instead of the blue painters tape.  That stuff bleeds.  Onto your wood floors.  Which you will have to scratch off with a screwdriver or your fingernail.

3. It takes forever to go around and touch up all your walls with a tiny craft brush.

4. Not as long as touching up your dinged up trim with the tiny craft brush.

Mind the Gap. 

5. If you ever do this again, just go ahead and caulk around the trim before you start painting anything, so that you don't have gaps between the walls and trim. By the way, we will have to do this again because EVERY  piece of floor molding in our house looks dinged up like this and 90% of our house does not have the quarter-round trim at the bottom.  I think it was removed in order to refinish the wood floors and never replaced.

And the big lesson we learned: if you are going to do it, go ahead and do it right from the beginning.  Don't try to just go halfsies. 

Caulk, paint trim, paint walls.  Done.

finally the AFTER!!!

I'm so happy with how it looks now (despite the gaps) and now we get to start filling it in with things.  Like this rug from rugsusa.  I'm waiting for a 75% of sale, which it looks like they have fairly often so that this baby can come in for around $100 with free shipping. 

Then we'll be getting the crib as a hand-me-down from Dillon's family, moving over the dresser from our room to serve as a dresser & changing table, plopping in my grandma's rocking chair (that I will hopefully make some sort of back cushion for.  My shoulderblades fit magically between the slats in the back in a very painful way).  Make a footstool. Hang some decorations, a mobile, and have a baby.  Easy as pie! 

Here's how we're going on the list:

TO BUY:
-Rug for nursery
-anything that's not a gift off our registry
TO DO:
-read birthing books
-tour the hospital (by the way, I was the only mama there writing things down and asking questions!!! Do these ladies not understand this stuff is IMPORTANT??? or am I just a little too type-A for this?)
-preregister at the hospital
-make sure our insurance will still all work out since Dillon's place of work changed providers (grrrr)
-Take our birthing classes
-Take our "breastfeeding and newborn" class
-Finish up our registries (since Target's in-store selection was limited and we haven't even started the 2nd one)
-Look into placenta encapsulation (anyone had any experience?  Is it worth it?)
-Attend shower
TO MAKE:
-sheets
-cushion for rocking chair
-footstool
-mobi wrap (don't have to! Thanks, Meghan, for offering to send us one of yours!!!)
-mobile
-portable high chair thinger
-Nursery decor (some sort of sign with a favorite hymn written on it)
HOUSE TO DO:
-Paint nursery
-Finish Railing
-complete flooring (transition strips and heating vent)
-Finish our pantry cabinet (add shelves, paint, and fill with all the crap that's covering my counters and stressing me out)
WANT TO DO:
-mini-babymoon by showing up at a friend's house for the weekend
-Ikea Trip
-Knit a onesie
-Make and freeze a bunch of meals

ONWARD!!!