Fifty shades of every paint color ever

Even though we now have some small idea of what our little one is going to be like, we know we don't want a blue sports crazytown room, so it's time to commence the preliminary rounds of Baby Nursery Decisions!, which I'm going to officially name and treat like the Olympics.  Also, the Olympics start in thirteen days, and we all know how I feel about the Olympics, so we better get some of this nursery stuff knocked out so I can focus on curling.

The walls were a perfectly fine neutral tan sort of color, but I really didn't want out baby to have brownish walls.  Commence the color debate!  And actually, we both liked the idea of doing a yellow nursery (agreement, huzzah!), so the dad-to-be was off to Home Depot to clean them out of pretty much every yellow-ish paint sample that exists.  And then the narrowing process began...

The contenders get a spot on the wall for further consideration...

...while the rejects sit sadly to the side.  Sorry, rejects.

After much debate and overanalyzing (I'll let you guess who did most of that) and moving paint samples from wall to wall, we committed to getting samples of four colors and slapping them on the wall to see how we felt about them.  Ok, let's pick a yellow!

And we kinda picked a yellow.  But then, because why would we keep anything simple, we decided it would maybe also be a fantastic idea to put up a chair rail and do a DIFFERENT color under the chair rail and also put up crown molding and definitely make sure we have the right color for the ceiling, too. Aaaaaand here we go.  Yeeps.

Fortunately we were a little more decisive on the grey (or is it gray? Apparently I skew British on that one) for the bottom portion of the wall.  I mean, yes, we still taped up paint chips and overanalyzed and narrowed it down to four and threw some paint on the wall, but it just went a lot faster than the Yellow Debate. Besides, Harrison was helping with this decision.

Allllll the colors.  And a ceiling fan with no blades.  And miles of tape and acres of dropcloth put into place.  We're doing this thing.

Zach really isn't sure if any of this is a good idea.

All decisions in place, finally, and let the painting begin!  We debated hiring someone to do this, and after each of us put about twenty strokes into painting the ceiling, we thought that might have been a really really REALLY good idea. Have you ever painted a ceiling?  It's a giant pain - fortunately Craig will not be defeated by something like paint, and he powered through and did a dang good job on it.  You go, honey!

I taped up a fake chair rail to guide us, and we kept painting.  And painting.  And painting.  Lightening walls isn't ideal, because often you need juuuust that extra coat of paint to make sure it really looks good.  Yeeps.

You're making excellent progress, husband.

But the painting is done!!  Well...mostly.  We'll have to do a few touch-ups here and there, and the chair rail and crown molding still have to be painted to match the trim in the room, but the giant swooshes of rollers are all taken are of.  Gallons of sweet chamomile, lemon souffle, and gentle rain later.  And here's where we stand at the moment...

The yellow looks way brighter at night - I'm hoping it all mellows out a bit once we have the room pulled together.  Although it really doesn't matter, because this yellow is what it is.  We're committed.

Looking good!  We were even making really good progress on the chair rail until we got halfway around the room and realized that, even with measuring and using a level along the way, we managed to drift up about an inch from where we started.  And for the OCD anal person in me, that is most definitely NOT ok.  So on tap for this weekend - perfecting the chair rail.  And the crown molding.  And getting them puttied and caulked and painted.  And getting all the supplies out of the room and babying it up a bit.  That's probably a little optimistic for just one weekend, so I'll let you know how it goes.

I hope you like your room, baby - Mom and Dad are putting some sweat into this one.  And I love it.