Since I haven’t had time to do car things, I’ll post house things! I had the day off today to just try and get some time away from work – it’s been hectic lately and my mind just needed some R&R. I needed to do something other than deal with problems all day and just do something relaxing. “Relaxing” in my world doesn’t mean laying in bed all day – I can’t stand that… Instead, I got to work on the nursery now that we know the gender and spend some quality time in the garage afterward.

Diana and I have been discussing what we wanted to do with the nursery for a while now – we just had to wait until we knew if it was a boy or girl so we could get get the colors. You see, Diana and I are a strangely effective team… Diana just throws out random ideas and I bring them to life. She doesn’t really lift a finger most of the time, but she is a tough critic. A lot of the time, my vision of her ideas work and all is well – I haven’t really come across a time where it hasn’t (lucky me). Until that day comes, we will continue being that strangely effective team where she blurts out ideas and I continue being the laborer without pay. I guess it all works out in the end – the day it doesn’t is the day I stop LOL.

Here’s how the nursery sat for a few months. We bought all the furniture – more of which you cannot see to the right of me – and we just had it there so we wouldn’t have to worry about the expense later.

Diana wanted a feature wall and we bounced many ideas back and forth. She knew she wanted purple, but we didn’t really finalize on anything until a few weeks ago… So I went to town. I taped off the surrounding area to get started on the edges…

I can’t remember what the paint color was called but it’s similar to a very faint lilac purple.

Edges first! Pro tip: Do the edges first so when you use your roller, you can roll over the brush marks and it looks more seamless.

This was the first coat. It went on light and as it dried, it got darker. Pretty nice…

While I was waiting for the paint to dry, I decided to run to Home Depot to pick up a Cedar board and start another project.

I painted it with a kimono purple – another color we picked up for the walls.

Here is where my creativity blossomed LOL. Diana wanted polka dots on the wall – and I was free to do whatever I wanted with them. The first problem was how to get perfect circles without using freehand brush.

So, I found my zipties, a Stella Artois glass holder, and an old shirt.

A few minutes later I come up with this. A cheap and somewhat-effective stamp tool.

Here’s what the first few circles looked like in the pure kimono purple. The problem with my stamp tool is that it wasn’t doing exactly what I was hoping it would do. Turns out when you go to stamp it, you just get a runny, uneven mess.

As a result, I ended up just stamping the outline and coloring in each circle one by one with a small brush and then running the brush along the other edge of the circle to keep them sharp. I am willing to bet anyone $100 I can now draw perfect circles after this project…

I decided that I wanted to ombre the shit out of this wall. I know this term because it’s the latest fad for girls to do to their hair in every color imaginable. It’s a fancy word for fading the color – girls just wanted a prettier term I guess.

Anyway, as I made my way down the wall, I just added more and more white to lighten it. I also wanted the polka dots to look like they were raining. I didn’t want the uniformity of perfectly placed dots. Too cliche. LOL

Anyway, I didn’t take many pictures in between it all because I was on a roll. This was the finished result!

Here it is without the tape and a bit better lighting. Beautiful.

After I finished that, I went on to complete the second project. A growth board for baby A. Thought it would be a nice addition to the room… People end up spending $60+ for this. I spent $4.20. SUCK IT

And it’s all completed! I still have to mount the growth board on the wall but this is how it sits for now. Still lots to go but it’s getting there!