Mini, Mama, & Co.: Lincoln's Room

Transforming Olive's old color scheme to a boyish setting was really fun! Busy and time consuming and at times super frustrating, but all in all really fun!

First, here's the finished product!

Here's how it used to look:

Ever since we found out we were expecting a boy, the nautical theme just sort of popped out to me.

The simple stuff:

I recovered the foot rest/ottoman with a fun geometric navy print, made a red pillow for the couch, and decorated the nursery with some poppy nautical decor. The lamp is from Ethan Allen, when my parents were first married. It's amazing. Micah has a love/hate relationship with it, but it's such a great childhood love of mine, I'm totally stoked to have it in my house again. My sister-in-law Cara made the adorable whale pillow on my rocking chair & the navy striped pillow with the L in his crib. Serious talent!

The hard stuff:

After hunting for the right color of navy blue, Micah and I set to painting.

To make a long story short, the whole process was soooo time consuming and frustrating because of minor set backs...

We first sanded down the edges of the coral stripes & taped off the walls. That wasn't the bad part of the whole process..

Our first can of paint was too glossy, so after painting the whole wall twice we realized we had to switch it out for a more matte finish.. Awesome.

One silver lining: Micah has a lot of contacts at Home Depot (thru work) and one of them happened to be working in the paint department when he went in to get the matte finish paint.. He gave us the whole can for free! Love it.

So we get halfway through painting the wall with the correct paint finish and for some strange reason, the paint starts to peel off as we are painting... Yep. Our rollers were just some crappy quality and they were actually sticking to the paint and pulling it off, clumping it all over. Awesome.

Back to the store I went, picked up our hopefully last can of navy, and went home with new rollers as well.

That was the trick & the whole wall looked perfect. My next mistake/idea was to paint a stencil on the wall. I really wanted to do a wallpaper from the very beginning, something with a fun geometric print, but couldn't find anything that was perfectly what I wanted. So stencils seemed like my next best option. I found our stencil on http://www.royaldesignstudio.com and was totally optimistic about it.

We picked up some white paint and set to work on the stencil.

To say it didn't work would be SUCH an understatement. We started along the baseboard, to get it in an even straight line.

What the picture doesn't show up close is the fact that the lines aren't crisp and even.. The paint leaked thru the edges so they are wavy and rough looking. Totally NOT the look I wanted!! We were using a tiny roller for the first several stencils and realized that it wasn't going to work. So I bought a sponge so we could try a different approach aaaaaand it still looked like crap. Also for some weird reason the paint looked like it was crackling (like that nail polish that was super popular for a bit where you paint it over the top of a different color and it crackles thru).

My last idea for the wall was to paint a highlight white stripe on the navy and to put Linc's name in red vinyl and be done.

We started painting the white and quickly realized the white paint had something really wrong with it. It was crackling along the stripe too, not just an accident with the stencil. It was also drying weird and getting clumpy, leaving these huge globs of paint on the wall. Awesome.

So I wiped off the thick crap and we gave up for the night. So freakin annoying!!

Micah returned the crap paint for a free new can of paint (thank you Home Depot!) and we sanded down the stripe as well as the stencil fence haha.

After a lot of taping and reprinting, it finally finally FINALLY is done! The only thing we had left to do to the wall was to add a red vinyl to his stripe. Of course this has issues too.. I bought window cling vinyl accidentally.. Not the "proper" type of vinyl unfortunately, which I didn't know wouldn't stick to the wall until after Brittany came over with her silhouette machine & we spent forever going over fonts and sizing it up just perfect.. Awesome.

So after hunting down the correct vinyl, we recut it and Micah and I then pressed it to the wall.