Penelope's Room

Now that the kids are moved into their new room, it's time to transform the kids' old room into Penelope's room. This is how the room looked once the kids were moved:



I knew that I wanted Penelope's room to be brown. Several weeks ago, Gary went to Home Depot and brought home every paint sample of brown paint that he could find. I spent a ridiculous amount of time staring at those paint chips. I didn't want it to be too red, I didn't want it to be too drab, it had to blend with the carpet and adjoining walls, and in general just had to be just the perfect shade of brown. I finally settled on the color, and Gary picked up the paint. The weekend before last, Gary took on the task of painting the new room. I went upstairs to take some photos of Gary taking down the tape and putting back on the light covers, etc. Gary really did a great job with the paint, especially considering it was such a dark color. Gary later told me that he thinks it's the best paint job he's ever done. I told him that was good because it was the most important paint job he's ever done.






I L-O-V-E the new paint color! I was really scared that it was not going to be the right color, but once it was up it was exactly what I had envisioned!



The next step was this past weekend when Gary put together the crib. This did not go exactly as planned. I bought the crib about two months ago and the box just sat in our garage. Saturday morning Gary walked out to open the box up, and walked back in the house with a look on his face that scared me (he told me later that it was because he wasn't sure how I was going to react). I asked him what was wrong, and he said, "the crib is brown." I argued with him for a while saying that it was most certainly not brown and that I had bought a white crib. I even went into the garage to look at it myself. Gary was not confused. It was a brown crib. After checking my order and confirming that all of the furniture was supposed to be white, Gary dutifully loaded up the crib and was waiting outside Pottery Barn for Kids when it opened. It was an amazing stroke of luck that they happened to have the correct white crib in stock. Almost everything that I want from that store is on backorder for 1-2 months, and I was terrified that the same would happen with the crib. Thankfully, Gary returned home with a white crib and had it put together in no time (he does have a lot of experience with cribs). Gary did open every box that we had to ensure that we had the proper color of everything else that has come in, and everything else was right. Here's the crib:



Once the crib was put together, the next step was to put up the wall sticker (which I basically designed the entire nursery around -- as Gary would say, you have to start with something). Unfortunately, it came in about a zillion pieces. Okay, maybe not a zillion, but well over 100. Gary was not very excited about this project, at all. It was something that I had hoped I would be able to put up myself, but it didn't work out that way. As the project progressed, however, Gary became more excited about the wall sticker, and at one point decided he wanted wall stickers all over the nursery! He even described himself as Picasso at one point. Anyway, here are pictures of the progression of the wall sticker:






And the room now:



We are still waiting on a couple of pieces of furniture to be delivered, and I think we have narrowed down our selection of gliders, so I think we are on target to have the room done in plenty of time. Thanks, Gary!!