In October 2018, in between my two pregnancies (the first which ended in a miscarriage and the second which led to the birth of our daughter in January 2020), I spent a few days painting yellow ombre stripes on the walls of the room that would become our nursery. I wrote about the process in this blog post, but the "tl;dr" of it was that 1) it gave me something to do to transform my grief after miscarriage into hope that we would get pregnant again and use that room as a nursery some day after all, and 2) it involved a lot of painter's tape. Like, a LOT a lot. And then a lot of touching up once the tape was removed and we saw all the oopsies we managed to make despite the painstaking measuring and taping. But I loved the end result, and I loved it even more when we had furniture in the room too, and we started using it for our daughter.
(See more pictures of the finished nursery in this blog post.)
So when we decided to move... of course I had to recreate stripes again in her new bedroom. It was one of the things I was saddest about leaving behind in our old house, and something that I knew would make our new house feel like ours. I also hoped that it might ease our 1-year-old's transition - I reasoned that if her new room looked similar to her old room, it'd be easier to get used to living in a totally new house. On the other hand, we have a pretty easy-going child, and I think her general go-with-the-flow attitude about moving had more to do with her personality and her age (being just young enough still that she doesn't quite yet *expect* things to stay the same from day-to-day) than about me painting stripes. Saying it was "for her" would be a lie. She doesn't say any words yet (other than "mama mama mama" all day long) and I have no idea what her favorite color is, or what her feelings are about stripes. In all honesty, painting stripes on her walls for me, and for me alone. ;)
What I didn't anticipate about painting stripes the second time around was how much longer it would take, thanks to 1) the aforementioned 1-year-old, and 2) the fact that we weren't yet living in the house when I painted them. We wanted the room painted before moving our daughter's furniture (and ourselves) in, which meant I could only paint during the few short hours we would drive down to our new house on weekends. My husband did all the measuring and marking with a pencil, and helped with some of the taping. Those processes took at least a weekend in total (it was so long ago I don't remember at this point). Then once we were ready to go, I painted two stripes one day, another two the next, and then didn't get to paint the fifth and final stripe until the following weekend. And then the touch-ups... First the room was pink when we bought the house - light pink on 3 walls and dark pink on the 4th wall - and some of the lighter yellows I chose did not cover the dark pink wall very well, and required two coats. I also had to do white touch-ups on the ceiling, trim, and door frame. And of course the touch-ups along each "seam" where the paint changed color. All in all I was painting for 1.5 months - an hour here, an hour there, when we were in the new house for a short time between our daughter's naps (which we tried to time with the drives back and forth between our houses, since it was an hour-long drive each way, and it was convenient for her to be able to nap in the car). It was SO MUCH work. But again... I loved the end result! And I loved it even more when we moved in, added her furniture (and books and toys) and it really became *her* space.
There is one big change I made from the first room - instead of doing 5 shades of a slightly greenish yellow, I did 5 stripes of warmer (slightly orangeish) yellows, and orange. In her old room, there was a brown hardwood floor, and we had a light green area rug that I had to coordinate the colors with; going too orange with that yellow was not an option - it just didn't look nice with the rug. But her new room has white carpet, which means the area rug didn't come with us (we had no use for it elsewhere in the house either), and I wasn't restrained in color choice trying to coordinate with it. Instead, I focused on choosing colors that would go with the artwork I created for her, and something that would pick up the browns in her wood furniture. I decided to branch out from just doing one color family (yellow) and used both yellow and orange instead. So the first stripe was a pale yellow ("String Cheese"), the second stripe was a slightly yellower/darker ("Vanilla Ice Cream"), the third stripe was a really saturated yellow ("Yellow Jubilee"), and then I transitioned to more orange with two shades of yellowish-orange, one lighter ("Solar Storm") and one darker ("Splendor Gold").
I won't write up the whole process again, since it was the same as the first time I did it - measure, draw pencil lines, tape alternate stripes, paint, take the tape off, put new tape up, paint more, etc. - but here are some of the in-progress pics so you can get a sense of the steps I took:
Lots of work? YES. Worth it? Also yes.
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