Ongoing Nursery Project: Painting Stripes!

HY and I are on the way to the US! Right now, we're sitting in the JAL Lounge for one of those blah layovers that are too short to do anything interesting, yet they still make you get off the plane just to go through security. So I thought I'd update my blog about something I've been meaning to write about. 

I've had my heart set on big, horizontal, light grey and white stripes for the nursery since about Week 4 of the pregnancy. After getting a price quote from the painter (which was a reasonable quote), HY and I thought about it for a while, and after the painter left, we both looked at each other and said, "It'd be kind of fun to do it ourselves!" We were just waiting for the painter to leave to tell each other. I painted most of my last house myself, so I know I can paint, but I have never tackled stripes before. We made a trip to the hardware store to pick a paint color, brushes, a laser leveler, and lots of painter's tape. This is how the room looked after we finished taping it up, which we worked on for a night, and then I finished the next day when HY was at work. It would've gone by a LOT faster but there were two big problems. The first is that we had no tripod, so I had to use some creative vertical stacking of a lot of our living room furniture to put the laser leveler on. Then I'd fine tune it using thin books, magazines, floor pads, whatever got it JUST right. It was probably not the safest way to do it. The other thing that absolutely sucked was the laser leveler we got (and spent about 100+ bucks on, or 3000+ TWD). It was not level at all, so I ended up using a ruler to do most of the stripes, otherwise the baby would have serious vertigo issues with wonky stripes throwing his equilibrium off.

Another big setback was after test painting a spot on the wall, I realized the paint color we chose was very different color from the paper swatches in the hardware store. Once painted, it was not a soft grey, but more like a soft pink. We had to go back to the store to pick up a pot of grey paint to mix with it. While HY was at work, I started mixing grey paint in, which made the hue better but the paint ended up being WAY too dark. Luckily I had a big can of white paint left from our previous renovations, so after throwing in the whole can of white paint, it was a nice light soft grey. It took me a whole morning just to mix the paint just right. It still has a hint of purple grey, but we're both ok with that. The plus is after all that mixing, we have 3 big cans of paint to use for the nursery, so we can get plenty of coats out of that. Here's hub HY painting (I wouldn't let him take a pic of me bc I looked like a crazy hot mess after all that paint drama):

Below is the nursery after its first coat of paint. We'll probably do another coat or two, which will saturate the color a little more. After painting, I had a terrible bout of carpal tunnel syndrome, which scared me from painting any more, so the rest of the nursery will have to wait until HY has time to finish the painting. 

 

 Anyways, about time to get back on the plane...happy flying to us! Next time I'll be blogging from the US!