Well, I have finally started to get Holly’s nursery ready. She has been sleeping in our room (but in her crib) since we brought her home, and will continue to sleep with us for another month or so, and then off she will go to her own digs.
This is the room she is moving into. It shares a Jack-and-Jill bathroom with Emrick’s room and has served as a guest room ever since we moved into this house in 2009. We’ve had a queen bed in here for the past few years, which had to be moved out as I prepped the room for painting. It’s currently leaning against the bannister on the upstairs landing, and will make its way to the basement eventually.
Last spring while I was pregnant, I had visions of a pink and peach nursery. I pictured pale peach walls with deep pink accents. Peach is a very 80s color, but I have always thought it looked pretty with dark pink. So I started Googling “peach pink nursery” for some ideas, and that was fine, but I hadn’t really settled on a plan. Then, late in the summer, I found and bought this dress at a Carter’s outlet store:
And I looooove it. It’s a coral shade of pink, set off by a gray and white background. I think it is so, so darling. So when I started to think seriously last month about getting the nursery ready, I turned to this dress for inspiration. I considered painting the walls a deep coral pink, but I knew that could be a little overwhelming. So I thought instead that it might look nice to have coral accents against gray walls. But if I went with gray walls, it would have to be a really, really light gray. A shade of gray even as dark as in the dress above would be too much for a color that was going to cover all the walls, in a small room that faces northwest, and is to be occupied by a baby girl, not a tax accountant.
So I searched around and found a very light gray that I liked a lot, and that seemed to be devoid of any blue, green, or purple undertones (as grays so often are). You’d be surprised at how hard it is to find a simple gray that doesn’t pick up those other hues when placed next to certain colors. Anyway, the gray I liked is “Crushed Ice” by Sherwin Williams:
It looks somewhat taupe here, but the paint swatch, which I picked up at a Sherwin Williams paint store, doesn’t look that way at all, and neither do the pictures of actual rooms painted with this color. Anyway, so I decided on Crushed Ice as a strong contender for the wall color.
As for where my coral pink would come from… Back in December I was browsing the local classifieds for second-hand furniture listings (this is how I have fun) and I spotted a hideous but interesting dresser for sale for $30. Hideous because the paint job was the worst paint job in the history of the world, but interesting because it had a nice shape. A new paint job could make this piece really pretty and unique. So I bought it! I initially had it in mind to use as a foyer table, using the drawers as storage, but a couple of weeks later, after I’d settled on a coral+gray color scheme for the nursery, I thought it might be fun to paint it a bright coral pink and use it in the nursery instead. A coral dresser would look great against a pale gray wall, or maybe against a gray and white stencilled wall, kind of like in the dress.
Here is the dresser with its hideous paint job. (This is how it looked when we bought it):
AGAIN — TO BE CLEAR — I DID NOT DO THIS TO THIS DRESSER. THIS IS HOW IT WAS WHEN WE BOUGHT IT. And YES, it is hot pink with yellow and green argyle diamonds on it. Apparently, the previous owner wished upon a star and that’s what she got. Argyle. When we went to look at/buy this dresser in December, the woman who answered the door looked about 30. She said the dresser had served her well for many years, but that she didn’t “have room” for it anymore. I hope she assaulted the dresser with this paint job when she was fifteen years old or something, and not, you know… last year.
You may not be able to tell from the pictures, but the paint looks very gloppy in some areas and so the dresser needs a good stripping before it is repainted. I have already made one attempt at stripping it, but it was a bit of a bust. But the plan is to strip this baby and paint it a coral pink. I once again turned to Google for ideas for a good coral paint color, and found that lots of people have painted their dressers coral. So much for thinking I had an original idea! I have spent hours, literally, trying to decide on the right coral pink paint color. The internet seems to favor Benjamin Moore’s “Coral Gables”, Sherwin Williams’ “Charisma”, and Behr’s “Cool Lava”, but some of those swatches look a lot different in person than they do online. And so in studying the dozens of paint swatches I picked up over a period of several weeks, I found that Benjamin Moore’s “Old World” seemed most to have the quality I was looking for. Not too pink, not too orange, not too muddy.
If all goes well with my next paint-stripping attempt, I’ll have the dresser painted “Old World” before the end of the month. And if I can’t get enough of the old paint off to make the new paint job look good? Well, I’ll just re-list it in the classifieds and tell the buyer that I don’t “have room” for it.
Now back to the walls. Although I thought I’d decided to paint the walls gray, I started to second guess that choice. I saw some gray-walled nurseries online that still managed to look sweet and light and baby-appropriate, but still, I began to wonder if even that very light shade of gray was a little bleak for a nursery. And then I began to think to myself, How often do you get an excuse to paint your walls PINK?? If it were a pale enough pink, and if it had a peachy quality to it, then the coral would still create a nice contrast with it. Besides, a pale peachy pink wall color had been my original plan while I was pregnant anyway. So I started to examine the lightest shades on all of those coral paint swatches I’d picked up.
And I settled on Benjamin Moore’s “Bridal Pink”.
It’s a nice, pale, peachy pink and will be a nice backdrop for the white crib, the coral dresser, and… gray curtains? I don’t know. I definitely still want gray in the nursery (I think), and I also plan to maybe stencil one wall, so maybe I will use gray paint there. Or maybe metallic gold! Yeah, gold. Can you tell that I am extremely indecisive and have trouble sticking to one decorating vision for a room? No?
Well, despite my indecisiveness, the Bridal Pink is etched in stone (or rather, dried in large swaths of latex) because I bought it last week and it’s already on the walls. I am not finished yet. There are two coats up, and it needs a third, but here it is so far:
Yeah, that’s pretty bad for two coats, isn’t it? The BM paint has primer mixed in with it, so when discussing it with Marcus, we decided that even though we would be painting light pink over dark tan, that we could get away without priming first. But alas! It appears we need at least a third coat. And I tell you, it’s one thing to three-coat the walls; it’s another to three-coat all of the edges around the trim and ceiling, which has to be done with a brush because the roller doesn’t reach those spots. I just did the third coat on the edges on Monday, while the kids napped, and man, that !@#$ is tedious. Tuesday I will do a third coat with the roller, and if that doesn’t cut it, my girl may just have to live with patchy walls.
But that’s not even the worst of it. Actually, that probably is the worst of it. But almost as bad is that the shade of pink I chose does not look good with the shade of white that’s on the trim and the doors. The shade of white on the trim is Sherwin Williams’ “Dover White” and it was put in the house by the builder.
It looks good against the original dark tan, and it also happens to look good with Benjamin Moore’s “Moonshine” which I used in the office and the play room.
It’s a very off-white, yellowy, ivory color that looks crisp and clean against deeper shades, but against the bale bridal pink, it just looks old and dingy.
I really shouldn’t post that picture above because I know that in that picture, the Dover White (shown most prominently on the closet doors) looks fine. Not ideal, but good enough. But in person, I promise you, it looks really bad. Even Marcus agrees. The doors look old, dirty, and yellowed by time. If I were more talented, I’d probably try to work with it and play up an “antique”-looking vibe with it. But since I am not sure I’d know how to pull that off, my options are either just to leave it as is and ignore it as I plan the furniture and decor for the rest of the nursery, OR repaint it. That means repainting all the baseboards, the closet doors, the door to the room, and the door to the Jack-and-Jill bath. And oh my, the ceiling too! That’s a lot of work, and I wasn’t sure if it was “okay” to have the trim in one room be different from the trim in the rest of the house. So I consulted the internet on this topic, and while different “pros” say slightly different things, overall it seems that painting the trim in here would be all right since the room is self-contained, and the fact that it is a child’s room apparently gives me extra license to use a different trim color in here. If I do decide to paint the trim, I don’t know if I will just paint it a lighter and brighter white that doesn’t look yellow against the pink (probably) or if I will paint it an actual color. I saw a nursery online with deep pink trim, and I seem to remember that Samantha and I shared a room with pink baseboards in our house on Shady Drive in Florida. What to do?
Here are some pictures of the kids!
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