We are finally in a place where we can really start tackling the nursery. Previously this room was our office, and by office I mean: place where paper comes to die and/or begins the planning stages of a coup that threatens to take over our lives and smother us while we sleep.
During the removal of said paper, I believe our final count was four huge lawn and garden-sized trash bags of shredded insanity: old bills, old mail, you name it ... We shredded so much paper that we actually killed our shredder and had to buy another one.
In addition, we had to clean out the closet, which was full of off-season clothes and other stuff that we could just not find a place for. It took us ages to just sort through everything in the office and decide what to keep and relocate, what to toss, what to donate, what to save for yard sales ...
The office was also full of about ten produce boxes full of my books - you could barely move in there. Those have been temporarily relocated to our guest room, so one of my next projects will be to unpack and re-sort all of my books onto bookshelves (FINALLY. We've only lived here almost two years ...).
We also needed to remove the hanging desk/shelf system from the wall - seen here, in one of the listing photos of our house (I didn't take any real "before shots" because I was too embarrassed by the disaster that was contained within the four walls of this room):
{Again, this is one of the listing photos of our house, our office has never looked this lovely and organized, sadly}
Plus, we had to dismantle and move the futon that we bought from the previous sellers, seen here:
{Listing photo}
This turned into rather a huge ordeal - because the futon frame wouldn't fit through the doorway - my husband and father-in-law had to practically unscrew the whole damn thing and then reassemble it in the basement. Not to mention, moving futon mattresses themselves is hard - they don't have the rigidity of a regular mattress and they're slippery as heck. I mean, not that I actually really participated in the manual labor portion of these events, but from what I observed it all seemed rather taxing ...
As you can see from these photos (or maybe you can't, who knows) - the existing wall color was rather nice - sort of a green/blue-gray. It's from Martha Stewart's line that she did for Sherwin Williams several years back, I believe it's called "Draftsman's Gray." Depending on the light, it can look more blue or more gray.
As I've mentioned before - I knew I wanted an aqua and yellow room, with aqua on the walls. So I went with my lovely friend Erin and we picked out a few paint swatches and bought two samples to try out. We also tried out the lovely aqua color that's currently in our kitchen, but the light in this room just made it a bit too gray.
You can see the paint samples on the wall in the photo above, the one with the ladder. One was way too dark (although a truly lovely color), one was too light (kitchen paint color) - so the hubs and I ended up opting for a Valspar color match of Behr's "Seafoam Pearl" (470A-2):
Honestly, I was initially a ittle hesitant about the color - I really didn't think it was going to be the color I had in mind. It just seemed too ... well, seafoam-y. Too much green.
But when the paint went on the wall, it really transformed into a true aqua. A lovely shade, and exactly what I had in mind. This could also have been the result of using a color match - we ended up using Valspar paint, since they had a low-VOC option - but apparently Lowe's does have Behr paints in their system. Oh, and I opted for the eggshell finish.
Regardless, it came out the exact blue-green I was looking for. Here's a picture of the doorway, shown after my mom came over and did the "cutting-in" - you'll also see my husband menacing our dog, per his usual:
And here's how it looked after one coat of paint - we probably could have left it at that, but we just decided to go ahead and put on another coat:
Excuse the shadows - I took this photo yesterday morning, and the light was not great for wall photography. (And yes, that is our computer in the middle of the room - I really need to get that thing out of here).
So, we've made a lot of progress! We just need to finish up the second coat, then begin to tackle the furniture assembly, something I am VERY excited about - I love putting furniture together :o)
