Nursery Phase 1

I wrote this a few weeks back, and never published it. So it is a little old – but I already took the time to write it. And I feel like painting the nursery multiple times because it didn’t work out the first time is sort of a right of passage. So now it's documented.

This past Saturday, we had two goals:

·         Paint the baby’s room

·         Build the crib

Simple enough right? We had already moved everything out of the baby’s room. Removed all switch plates, curtain hardware, nails, etc. We puttied up the holes, sanded them and primed the room. All of our paint supplies were already in the room. Painting should take about 2 hours.

And it did.

We were off to a great start.

Let’s back up. The baby’s room is going to be a light-medium gray. I painted the guest room a medium, bold gray a few years back and fell in love with it. I know that some people have trouble with paint swatches and how they look on walls. It is something I have never had an issue with. I pick a paint color, we paint, and it looks great.

The gray in the guest room was no exception. Dan panicked at first. “It’s SO dark.” “Don’t worry, if it looks bad when we are done, we can repaint.” “I mean .. I love it.” “Exactly.”

So the gray for the nursery required looking at many swatches to find the perfect, not-blue, not-green, not-purple, not-beige gray. Simple gray that looks like just a mix of black and white is hard to find. And hard to spot – as the undertones aren’t as apparent in the swatch. Perfect gray found. I knew it had just the tiniest hint of blue – but was much more ‘true gray’ than any other gray at Lowe’s and at Sherwin Williams.

We painted.

And it looked great.

I took a picture. Baby’s room on the left. Guest room on the right.

Then, we turned off the light to leave.

Carolina blue.

What?!

Half the time the room would be gray, half the time blue.

This won’t do.

“Our baby girl’s room is baby blue!” I pouted.

Dan, who really doesn’t like the idea of repainting, “this isn’t going to work.”

Well.. that sucks.

Especially because we are running out of paint stores.

And, if we build the crib, we now have to paint with the crib in the room.

Oh well. We can at least accomplish one of two things today.

Dan opens the crib to read through the instructions. Looks very simple, just a few screws. We’ve got this. He’s got this. Hey Kelley, do you want to look at this before I put it together?

I wish we had taken a picture. The crib had been dropped on the front right corner. The corner was completely smashed. Part of the side rail sticks out just a little bit as a decorative corner. And this was completely flat with the paint all peeling off. There were other scratches and dents, but the corner really took it over the edge. The crib had obviously been returned once before, as the hardware packaging was all taped up.

Thanks Target. Back it goes.

Long story short – you cannot exchange anything that is “online only.” It has to be returned and repurchased. Not a problem, except I bought the crib on sale. It was no longer on sale.

I spent an hour on the phone with customer support to figure out how to reorder one at the same sale price. Dan figures out the puzzle of getting all of the pieces back in the box.

The crib wouldn’t fit in either of our cars.

Lots of time, sweat, rope, and fingers crossed – we made it to Target around 9:30 to return the crib.

A full day of work to end up with nothing accomplished.

We spent Sunday laying by our pool and eating Hot-Now-sign Krispy Kreme donuts to make up for it. I think it did a pretty good job.

Teaser: Nursery phase two is a much less scandalous version of fifty shades of gray.