The Beginnings of the Nursery

I started this post way back when, and I guess it's time to finish it and post it now that this baby is almost here! So, here is the beginning of the nursery, the mountain accent wall. 

The finished wall! I love it!

Now that we've moved the guest room down the hall to craft room, we have an opened room for the nursery. This room, the smallest of the bedrooms, was always intended to be the nursery. When we first moved in two years ago, we decided that this room would be the eventual nursery and that we would tackle it last -- you know, with the idea that we would have the rest of the house "done" before we needed a nursery. Ha!

Then, once we knew Emmy would be moving in with us, we the first functional guest room would be occupied semi-permanently. So we outfitted a second guest room! But only barely. It was just all of the necessary furniture and function, no real design or aesthetic to speak of -- mostly because we knew that it would be the nursery before too long.  

Throughout the time that this room housed the second guest room, I never could really get started on any nursery ideas. Something about not having the blank walls or the empty room kept me from visualizing any possible outcomes. Or maybe I just thought it would be too much mental work and decided to wait for the clean slate of an empty room. Either way, the room now holds the assembled crib, the unassembled pack and play, half a closet of adorable baby clothes, a bookshelf full of kids books, and so much potential.

I have blank walls and a semi-empty room to work with! 

This is my best "before" photo which doesn't even show the room in it's original state of "guest room/catch all."

I originally thought that I wanted to do the nursery loosely Narnia-themed. I really like muted tones and soft colors, so I didn't want anything bright and over-the-top. And since we want this room to be the nursery for future kiddos, I didn't want anything too gender specific. 

I thought about doing an accent wall, but the ones that I was most drawn to were the wood plank walls. And we already have one of those, so I ruled that out. I liked the idea of an accent wall with wallpaper or stenciled designs, but I didn't really fall in love with any of them. I don't love murals because I feel like they're a lot of work that would need to be painted over down the line. Plus, they can feel really dated really quickly. 

Then I saw this picture on Pinterest. 

And I fell in love. Those mountains! Those grays! 

So Emmy and I took this wall as our inspiration and set to work. We free-handed the lines for the mountains, one layer at a time. We started on opposite sides of the wall and met in the middle so that each layer looked distinct. 

Then Emmy and our 16-year-old (very talented artist) cousin spent one Saturday painting the different layers. They started with a dark charcoal gray and a white and just mixed the two as they went along to achieve the different tones. 

The artists! I don't think they intended to match (in fact, I'm certain that they didn't plan that), but Go Tigers anyway! 

They made sure to paint a "swatch" of each of the shades that they mixed so that we could get a good color match for a gray for the remaining three walls. I was a little nervous that the gray still wouldn't be a good match, but it turned out great! I'll post pictures of the "finished" nursery soon. (I put "finished" in quotations because I don't think I'll ever get that room completely finished. This baby will be here before I get it completely done, and then, once he's here I don't think the trim paint or the other lurking final details will matter that much to me.)