Painting the Baby Room

The new baby won't be here for several months yet, but we wanted to start on the baby room. I figured it would be good for us to paint while I could still move around easily and help. I spoke with my doctor, who said that it would be fine for me to paint, as long as we stuck with latex paint, and that the main concern was  not so much with the fumes being toxic, but whether they would make me nauseous (but please make sure to check with your own doctor first!).

We don't know if it will be a boy or a girl, so we stuck with a neutral colour. We thought it would be nice to get rid of the pinkish-white that the past owner of the house used all over the place. I also thought a neutral colour would be a good idea, so that if we have another baby of a different sex in the future, we won't have to re-paint. Some might call it laziness, but I'll call it efficiency.

We didn't do too much paint colour research beforehand. We probably should have gotten a bunch of paint chips and taped them up on the wall so that we could see what the colours looked like in the light and at night, but we didn't plan things out that well. (There's that efficiency again.)

We trekked over to Home Depot and looked at some green paint. We settled on a paint colour called "Celery Sprig" (410C-3) by Behr. Painting took us a whole day, since we washed the walls first (you'd be surprised how dirty walls can be without looking like it!). We also had to do some patching. We were not very good at cutting in - we didn't use enough paint the first time around - so the second coat really made a difference and made the colour pop.

Here are our Before pictures. This is the problem with taking pictures indoors at night using just a flash - the colours are all weird. The walls almost look yellow, but they're actually a pinkish-white.

And here are our After pictures. The colour looked a little drab on the paint chip, but we used the fancy little machine at the Home Depot that showed us what a room painted with the colour would look like, and it looked much brighter so we decided to stick with it. It definitely did come out bright and cheery.

I'm pretty happy with the result, and plan on getting white baby furniture, which will keep the room nice and bright. We'll be getting rid of that old Ikea wardrobe that you can see in the bottom After picture. I'll have to find some nice new curtains for the room too - the old, dirty, blue fabric vertical blinds that the past owner left in that room just weren't cutting it for me and we finally threw them out. I've been wanting to do that since we moved in almost two years ago. I'm definitely looking forward to shopping for the baby!