Nursery Evolution: Paint

Our little Kraken will be here in late February, so after I had finished all of the Christmas sewing, I dove right into the painting of the nursery.  My major source of inspiration for the room came from this nursery.  (P.S. the source site is called Cheap and Chic, but the crib in that photo comes in at a whopping 700 plus bucks...not so cheap.) Anyway, back to the room.  I loved the dark walls with all that vibrant color, so that's what I'm working on for the Kraken.

Here is a before shot:

It's a bit of a Gloomy-Gus-Green, wouldn't you say?  In the past this room has been a lot of different colors, as evidenced by the different layers around the trim and the baseboard:  gloomy-gus-green, seafoam green, baby blue...and now dark gray.

We used California Elements Zero-VOC paint in Walrus.  It costs a gazillion dollars a gallon, but the No-VOC was important to me.  I probably could have picked up a cheaper gallon at one of the big box home improvement stores, but we went with a local supplier.  Anyway, it's a good color and it's not too dark.  I was really worried about the room being too dark.  The photo that seems to be the truest to the actual in-person experience is that middle photo above.

The next step in the paint evolution:  stencils and colors.  A few months ago Young House Love posted about stenciling their office.  It looked labor intensive, but while checking out the site from which they bought their stencil, I came across this stencil, which I call Circle Dots.  I latched onto this idea of circles and dots and just couldn't shake it.  So I bought it.  Expensive, I know, but at least I got a little bit of a YHL discount--Royal Design Studio is one of their sponsors.  Yay!

While we were buying the Walrus paint, we picked up about nine or ten little sample 2oz paint pots.  They are usually priced at $3.99, but were on sale for two bucks.  They were mostly Benjamin Moore sample pots with one California Elements pot.  There are six stencils of varying circle dot sizes, so I placed them around the room using the radiator and the high window as a sort of guide, and I would work toward the middle of each wall.  I couldn't place them all in a row, because they would overlap and I only had five stencil brushes, so I was limited in the number of colors I could use at one time.  It took about a week from start to finish.

So here are the results:

Minnesota Vikings colors for the Kraken's dad!

Final stencil placement!

I was not a stickler for keeping them all at the exact same height.  It seemed more fun to have them rolling a bit.  It was really neat to mix and match all of the colors, but it was also hard to not use the same colors really close together.  Some of my brushes didn't work as well as others and I definitely need to go back around the room for some quick touch-ups, but I love how this turned out.  It makes me very happy!

And it also gets the kitty stamp of approval: