The Nursery - chevron and alphabet project

I feel like I was missing the "baby gene" for at least the first 6 months that I was pregnant.  I was working hard and trying to get my at home business off the ground and frankly just couldn't be bothered to really think about all that it meant to be pregnant.  I didn't have the perfect nursery in mind and I hadn't been daydreaming about decorating it.  I was sort of dreading it, if we're being honest.  But, I did have a few ideas in mind.  I knew I wanted an alphabet wall, something like this:

 

I was overwhelmed with finding all of those different sized and styled letters and finally got the bright idea to try Etsy and found my savior!  It's a shop called simplysawdust and this was the product:

 

It was also very reasonably priced compared to what I was coming up with by trying to purchase the letters individually. 

I also knew I wanted a more gender neutral nursery - nothing that screamed boy or girl (it's a boy) and I've loved all the grey and white that I've seen around, lately, so I decided on a simple chevron wall.  I'm a little crafty and have done wall treatments similar to this before so I figured I'd give it a go myself.  My husband wasn't quite so sure about the whole ordeal but he was a good sport and our marriage survived it.

We also love elephants so I figured that could be a good way to sort of pick a theme and come up with some colors that would mix with the white and grey and give it some life.  I found this super cute set on Amazon, from Zutano.  At first, I wasn't sure about mixing the brown with the grey but it all ended up working out nicely.

So basically, we started with an all grey room (Agreeable Grey from Sherwin Williams to be exact) so I just picked up the pint size (I think) of a true white to add in the chevron.  I found a good tutorial online and with a yardstick, a laser level and some chalk, we started by chalking vertical lines on the wall, 10" apart from each other. 

 

The next step was to chalk horizontal lines, but that sounded like too much work and also just sounded like more chalk we would have to wipe away later on.  Instead, we just made tick marks down every 10 inches and then zig zagged them with our painters tape.  We had about 3 extra inches at the bottom so that last chevron is a little wonky but I think it adds character.

 

 

After that, you just figure out which ones you want to paint white.  I started with the second one from the bottom so that there would be some relief from the white base boards.  I trimmed up the corners in the lines that were being painted with an exacto knife so that I would get good, clean lines and stuck the extra tape pieces in the ones that weren't being painted so that I would remember.

 

A clue to this, which I didn't know the first time I tried a project like this, is to remove the blue tape while the paint is still wet.  Otherwise, if you give the paint the opportunity to dry, you may end up peeling some of the paint off with your blue tape.  We ended up pulling some of our paint off the walls in this case as well, but that was mostly because our base was builder grade and maybe wasn't the best place to start in the first place.

After the paint dried, I took a damp washcloth and wiped away the chalk lines.  I had to go over it twice and if you look at an angle, you can see the wipe marks, but again, I think this is mostly due to the fact that we didn't have the best wall surface to start with. 

I took my elephant pillow with me to Michaels and picked up some craft paint to paint the letters.  I used 5 different colors - white, brown, orange (as close a match as I could get), teal and lime green.  I didn't use a primer or anything (though maybe I should have) but just gave all the letters two coats of paint and called it a day.  I mixed up the color order a little bit so that it would be less predictable but who knows if that really made a difference in the final product or not. 

Initially, I had visions of stripes and polka dots and argyle but when it came down to it, I was 30+ weeks pregnant and tired and solid letters was all I could muster up the creativity to do.  I still may go back and add some additional colors in the form of stripes or polka dots to the white letters since some of them ended up in unfortunate places, but for now. I do love it and I'm so happy with how it came out.

When he's old enough to have an opinion, I hope our little boy loves it as much as I do and at least wants to keep the chevron wall and the alphabet in his room, but either way, we're ready for him!