We Painted the Nursery...Twice.

So I have a lot of checklists.  It is a habit I picked up from my mom and has stuck with me for better or for worse.  There is the daily checklist, the weekly checklist, the work checklist, the house checklist and, most recently, the Buttons checklist. October was the big month to start knocking off the Buttons checklist items.  October did not pan out.  We literally checked off one major item - buy baby books. Not read baby books, just buy them. (We now have six, I have read 1/4 of one).

The long debated color palate - thank goodness I
have creative friends. 

So, as we move into mid-November, we are finally getting to our Buttons October Checklist.  Item number one is to paint the nursery.  Item number two is to buy a crib and dresser to put in said painted nursery.  I fully intended to check off both items this past weekend.  Friday afternoon, we were already off to a pretty good start - I had previously tapped my decorating muse, Shelley, and she helped me figure out what we want the nursery to look like.  It's going to have grey walls with white furniture and accents in turquoise, orange-yellow and maybe some brown tones. The Aspen picture in the previous post will hopefully be one of the yellow accents we use. So, filled with the power of knowing that I like the color grey, Ian and I went to the mecca that is Home Depo Saturday morning and bought a beautiful light steel color using the conventional wisdom that you should buy lighter colors since the paint will dry darker.

We moved out the furniture and that afternoon Blair came over and helped up tape up all the walls and get down to actually painting. She and Ian came up with a brilliant plan where she would place strips of tape on the wall and Ian would follow behind and tape up the ceiling.  It was the best combo of short and tall cooperation I have seen in a while. 

Blair putting up the tape

And Ian following behind.

Don't worry, I got two OB-GYN approvals to paint. 

We worked for a grand total of around 8 hours if you include the Home Depo trip and the numerous time-outs I took to sit down and watch while Blair got me water and Ian kept painting.  After a long day of list-completing, we heartily congratulated ourselves for finally getting something done and went to watch the Longhorns game at the Texas-Exs bar nearby.  Little did we know that while we were watching Texas almost loose to West Virginia, contrary to all popular wisdom, the pretty steel-grey paint was drying lighter. 

Transition from blue grey to brown grey.

We came back and saw that the once cool grey, was now was heading toward baby blue.  I did not like it.  My pregnancy hormones did not like it.  Even Ian, who loves everything, did not like it. We pretended that a second coat would darken everything up and magically make our now blue room, not blue, but by the morning we knew that we would have to scrap our plans for buying a crib, drive back to Home Depot and reconsider our grey options.  Silly us for thinking that this would be the one home improvement project that only required one trip to the black-hole of weekend renovations. 

Sunday morning Ian had to stay home to work, so I ventured out myself and contemplated colors (by that I mean one color - grey) for the next 45 minutes.  I finally decided that 'going more brown' would help and switched from our cooly named 'Silver Screen' grey to the 'Granite Boulder' grey. How Colorado. Since the room was already taped up, the second coat went on much faster, cutting our painting time down to 3ish hours. 

As we wandered out of the nursery bleary eyed and spattered in two different shades of the same color on Sunday night, I realized we had spent spent the majority of our weekend completing only 50% of what we had set out to do.  In fact, we still had to do touch ups once everything dried, so really we were not even hitting the halfway mark. The college professor and the finance attorney were defeated by a color wheel.

But, I think there is a lesson in here somewhere.  We are just not going to get everything done. Pre-Buttons, Post-Buttons and (according to my mom) for the next 18 years, we will just need to be happy with what we can do.  And, on Tuesday night, we touched up the walls and completed the paint job:

We love it. We have a start on creating our nursery and can move on to our checklist for this weekend: the delivery and parenting class and buying that darn crib!