Nursery Progress Update

Sharing the nursery progress update along with the choices made and the process to making this gender-neutral nursery come to life! The perfect neutral paint, beautiful framed wallpaper and a clear vision = perfection!

OMG this is sooooo good!  I am so excited to show you the progress of the nursery I have been installing at my daughter Taylor’s house!!  In case you missed it, here is the plan I laid out for the room in their new house.

I started by choosing the mouldings I wanted to use to get the sizing right. Then, using my level around the whole room, I drew out where each box and piece of chair rail would go on the wall.

Once that was done it was time to pick out a paint color. This was the hard part. I went to the store and had a few samples mixed so that we could try the colors we thought we would love on the walls and look at them at various times of the day. Paint always changes with the kind of light you have in the room so it is always best to have samples up for a full 24 hours before making a final decision. And samples are much less expensive than committing to a gallon of paint!

We wanted to make sure that we had the best match for the adorable wallpaper we had picked out for the room.  We are going for classic, elegant and neutral. This nursery will be the room for each baby they have so we wanted it to be timeless!

Once we picked the color (and omg is it ever perfect!) I got to work.

I bought all of the moulding needed for the project and took the first afternoon to install the chair rail. The chair rail is the horizontal piece of moulding that goes around the entire center of the room. FUN FACT: It used to be installed in dining rooms to be a buffer between a chair and a wall so that chairs wouldn’t hit a wall when being pulled out from a table or placed around the perimeter of a room for extra seating. We all still seem to love a good chair rail even if a chair will never go near it! It is a pretty detail added to a room!

To make my life easier, I brought over my rolling cart to help keep my tools organized so I didn’t have them everywhere. I was also able to roll the cart around the room with me and my tools were always close by! And I used the top rack/shelf to set stuff on when I was standing so that I didn’t have to set my tools and stuff on the floor and constantly bend down. I highly recommend that you get yourself one for your projects! Taylor got herself a smaller version of this for her postpartum/baby care cart. Genius.

Next up was the picture frame moulding.  I absolutely loved installing this detail and my cordless 18 gauge brad nailer was perfect for this project! If you’re going to buy one nailer as a new DIYer buy this one!

It took two days for me to install it all and I came up with a pretty good method to get it done quickly. There are 24 boxes. Each box has four mitered corners. Each corner has two ends to miter together. That totals almost 100 mitered cuts for all of the frames!! So measuring and cutting took a large chunk of the time. And this part is oh so glamorous!!

 

Once that was all installed I took another two days to fill all of the nail holes and mitered corners to make it all look seamless and then caulk all of the boxes on both the outer edge and the inner edge. So, 8 x 24 = 192 edges not including all of the crown moulding and chair rail.

It all took me over 6 hours to caulk everything, but the caulking is what takes your project from good to great! It doesn’t matter how skilled you are, all the trades use it because it is that good! It all looked so amazing and I hadn’t even painted it yet. This is the part where I get giddy! I just burst inside when I see a project start to come to life!

Each piece of moulding for this project was bought already primed to remove one extra step for me. So once I filled all of the nail holes and caulked everything I could get right to painting!

 

Can you start to see it all coming together here, too?  Are you as excited as I am??

After I did all the installations it was time to paint all of the trim. OMG – it is so perfect!  When we held up the wallpaper next to the painted trim it confirmed that we made the perfect choice. It isn’t too gray or too brown. Sometimes it even has a soft green hue to it when you look at it in a certain light.

We chose Sherwin Williams Jogging Path and I had them mix it at 50%. This means that it is the same color but 50% lighter than what it looks like on the swatch.

I chose wall paint in and eggshell finish and painted both the walls and trim with this instead of painting the trim with trim paint. I did this because trim paint comes in semi-gloss and I didn’t want the trim to stand out from the walls. I just wanted all of the trim to be a soft added detail.

When painting any moulding it is so so important to take your time to tape off the edges.  There is nothing more frustrating than taping off, painting, and then having the paint color bleed under the tape where you don’t want it!  When taping off your walls, be sure to seal down your edges nice and tight to the wall or ceiling to get that perfect finish.

I used my fingernails to do this, but could have used anything that was straight and not sharp to really press down all the edges. So much time during a project is spent prepping more than the project itself!

When it came to the wallpaper, we chose a wallpaper that was not prepasted or peel and stick. This is traditional paste on the wall wallpaper. And I love this kind the most! It is the easiest to install in my opinion. And luckily they have smooth walls.

I already, and still, have the tools from all the wallpapering I did in the 1990s (if you can believe it). I just threw on an apron to be able to keep my tools handy in my pockets while I was up on the ladder. This helped so much!  It took me a total of 17 hours to wallpaper this room. I think because of all the cutting I had to do to get the wallpaper inside the boxes/frames.

Wallpapering Tools Used:

wallpaper paste

paint roller and pan

paintbrush

straight edge

sharp blade

sponge

smoothing tool

I precut all of the panels I needed for the boxes to allow me to just paper once I got started. Luckily the more narrow boxes were the perfect size for one strip of paper which made it so easy because the trim was already plumb/level!

When I painted the trim I decided to paint the return air vent and it was a great decision. The standard white color that it was would have stood out too much!

 

 

Now that the carpet has been installed, I have to zhuzh up the chandelier we put in and I want to also wallpaper the switchplates and outlets so they blend into the wallpaper and don’t stand out so much. I don’t like the way they look the way they are.

Once we are able to I will begin to move all of the nursery items in including the heirloom crib we are handing down to them (which is so beautiful).  It is all so very exciting! She is due in just over a week so I have my work cut out for myself to complete the space. What do you think so far?