October 2nd, 2008
Here follows the chronicles of how my wife and I put together the nursery for our up-coming baby (actually, I think babies are, technically speaking, more down-dropping than up-coming, but that's mere semantics).
First step, as always, is to remove the electrical covers from the walls. Note the blue colour. There's nothing wrong with blue, per se, but we didn't really like the shade or the -er- implications of blue walls in the nursery. The paint was a bit old and faded, too.
I used painter's tape to mark the borders in case I got sloppy with the paint.
And once I had all my paint, brushes, piles of newspaper, drop sheet, and other bits and pieces together, it was time to start painting.
The coffee colour was deliberate. Not only is it pleasant to look at and a nice earthy tone, it was also -er- gender neutral. I opted for a semi-gloss so that future grubby little handprints will be relatively easy to wash off the walls.
One thing I learned the hard way was to roll up to a couple of centimetres from the ceiling ...
... then use the regular brush to carefully touch it up to the top. This is the only way I know how to prevent little paint swirls being accidentally painted onto the surface I'm trying to preserve.
Okay, it's still partially wet here, so it doesn't look completely even but that's the painting all done. When it dries it'll look great.
Here's another wall. I used tape for the sliding door frame too ... I didn't trust my brushing and rolling accuracy around the mouldings and frames, so tape was a big advantage.
Now it's time to get the wallpaper mural ready. Here I am taking it out of its box.
Before starting to hang the wallpaper I trimmed this corner down so that it matched the wall. It seemed better to do it when it was still dry then trying to hack away at a wet soggy corner while it was half-affixed to the wall.
Once the paper is laid flat and ready for hanging, it's time to mix up the glue. Here it is. It looks like apple sauce, doesn't it? It had the same consistency too!
And up went the first piece of the mural. Note all the wrinkles. I eventually worked most of them out with a cloth, and once it dried, it shrunk down to a smooth flat surface ... though I was a bit concerned at first because I wasn't sure if the wrinkles would remain or not. I just had to trust that it would straighten out. And, thankfully, it did.
One thing the instructions told us to do was to "book" the paper once it was soaked with glue. That is just what it looks like here: After slathering on the glue to the next piece of wallpaper, fold the top and bottom back onto the glued side and wait for ten minutes before hanging. This is to ensure it expands properly prior to hanging it on the wall. One other thing I had to be careful to do was ensure all the pieces were "booked" for the same length of time. This was so that they all expanded the same amount; it made matching the mural much easier.
And here I am standing in front of the finished product. I was a bit worried about the quality of the job I was doing, and so I didn't get a chance to enjoy myself while I was doing it ... but once it was finished and I could stand back and look at it, I derived a great deal of satisfaction from the results.
A few days later I came back and trimmed the last little corners. Note how solid and flat it is now.
Next was time to paint the window sill. More painter's tape was used, though not on the window itself (it was a relatively easy job to scrape the paint off the window with a razor blade).
On to the details, now. We bought a bunch of stickers and little wood figures to add little touches to the nursery.
All the replacement cover plates had stickers put onto them.
And we glued the little figures onto the changing table
And there it is: The finished (and furnished) nursery ... all ready for baby! :)
Read more rants
- 
-
Comment on this rant -
Email me