ORC – Jest Cafe – Wk 2 – Kids’ Room

As a fun summary, here are the positives of participating so far:

I have connected with a lot of bloggers out there
Traffic jump to my site
My kids’ room is looking better
I still have 4 weeks to go… which gives me some sanity
Víctor is so excited about the upgrade! He talks about it with everybody that will listen: the cashier at the grocery store, the attendant at Home Depot, neighbors, etc., etc.

Here are the negatives of participating so far:

My husband is a week away from divorcing me
I haven’t read a book to my children in 2 weeks
I walk around the house hysterically planning color schemes
I wake up thinking about this at night
I need to find a rug TODAY to make sure it arrives before the end of this challenge!!!!!!! Any recommendations? (Elise, I decided to go with a rug instead of leather… but thanks for the advice!)

Progress this last week:

Painted walls
Installed wallpaper (which was pretty much a nightmare… says my husband)

Here is what I did, in pictures with explanatory graphics that I learned how to do 2 days ago:
Before starting any project, here are the basic steps you need to follow:Cute, ha?

Now, back to work:

The first thing I did for this week was to paint walls. Because the wallpaper is so dark, I wanted to paint the ceiling and one wall true white. I chose to paint with Decorator’s White from Benjamin Moore that is SO white it also works as a primer. Best decision ever! It looks beautiful.

See the difference?

After doing that, I painted the opposite wall in a blue that matched the wallpaper blue color. Why? 1) Wallpaper is too expensive so I didn’t want to cover three walls with it; and, 2) the wallpaper I chose has a busy design so I wanted to give the room a little bit of breathing by having a darker, moody wall painted to match the wallpaper color without being too busy.

I went to match the color to Cox Paint. They were so nice and put a lot of effort into finding the right color… and they did! I love how the blue looks.

For painting the ceiling and tall walls, you need a long stick to put the roller in. At the beginning, I was trying to use a stool… bad idea. A longer stick was much more useful. Also, for a darker wall, you need two coats of paint no matter what.

For the white wall I didn’t need two coats of paint. I even tried doing another coat in some places of the wall to see if it made a difference but it didn’t. One coat was enough. I was very worried about being able to paint a true white wall by myself after reading this post that Emily Henderson wrote in her blog a couple of years ago, but because the wall was off-white already, getting the true white to shine was easy and it only required one coat. Score!

Next up, the wallpaper. I will write a post on how to install wallpaper later this month, but, in the mid-time, take my word for it… it is very, VERY hard!. I tried to do it myself but couldn’t because I am not the handiest person in the world. Lucky me, my husband is, so he took over and did most of the work installing this paper. I became his minion by applying paste, singing songs, and cheerleading along the way.

Hygge & West gave me a nice discount on the Underwater World –Blue wallpaper that I have been wanting for this space for a while. I LOVE the copper details, crazy drawings and dark navy color for a moody look. Everybody that has been in our place since we installed it has commented on how cool the wallpaper looks. I am very, very happy with the decision. Here are some photos for your enjoyment: