Starting the nursery

We rarely use our two extra bedrooms so it's really easy for us to just toss things in there with an I'll-sort-it-out-later kind of attitude. I don't know if it's the nesting instinct that kicked in or if it just hit me that I'm inching closer and closer to my third trimester but I figured it was time to start getting busy. Everything I've read says that your second trimester is the best for being active and once you hit that last trimester things start becoming extra difficult. Plus, months ago Tony suggested we wait till around his birthday to put the nursery together and when I realized that was only a week and a half away I started to panic. So last weekend I started going thru the guest bedroom (soon to be baby's room) and began cleaning out some things that had been in there since our wedding. I finished up cleaning out this Saturday and Tony took his old bed up to his Mom and Dad's for them to use. We moved the rest of the stuff out and into the other spare bedroom and went shopping for paint.

We decided that a good primer was very important. All the walls in our house - with the exception of the bathrooms - are the same color. I LOVE the color (a very deep brown) but it's not what we wanted for a baby's room. We wanted something that would be brighter and go with the bedding. We picked a light shade of green. The trim in the room is all white and we really like that so it's going to stay just the way it is. The primer we used was Valspar (from Lowe's) and it was labeled High Performance. Boy did it do the job right! It was super thick and looked like Elmer's glue. We definitely recommend this for anyone who's doing a major color change.

At around 9 p.m. Saturday night we started taping the trim. Then we started painting the primer. I had to take a break every once in a while just because the fumes were getting to me. Somewhere around 1 a.m. we finished with the first coat of paint. While it was drying we made a late night trip to Wal-Mart to buy a new roller because the handle on the one Tony was using broke. When we got back to the house Tony told me he would finish the second coat by himself and that I should just rest or go to bed if I wanted. Either I was acting tired or he didn't like my painting technique, I don't know. Then sometime around 3 a.m. he woke me up - I had fallen asleep on the loveseat - and told me I could go to bed because he was done painting the room.

Here are the before and after paint photos.

Brown:

Green:

How do you like our little "work-station"? Now this is what I call recycling! Sorry for the quality of the shots..... I took these on my phone. I'll get better pics when we get everything finished. So far we're pretty pleased with our work!