Painting the New House: Dining Room

I already shared photos of the yellow and orange stripes I painted for my daughter's nursery in our new house. That was by far the most time consuming paint project I took on so far. But that's not to say it was the only one! We also painted an accent wall in the dining room, and we painted the new guest room and bathroom in the basement, as well as repainted the en suite bathroom upstairs. I say "we" because my partner and I are a team - I picked out all the paint colors, he went to Home Depot (in a pandemic!) to pick them up, and (depending on the room in question) we both did some of the prep work and painting. I couldn't have done it without his help and support... But now that I've gotten that out of the way, I'll just be using "I" pronouns from here on out, because yes, I did most of the actual painting - especially in the dining room, which is what today's blog post is about.

When we bought it, the house had the same beige color on the walls of the living room, entryway, dining room, and the upstairs hallway - except for one wall in the dining room, which was also beige, but with thick dark blue stripes. I've nothing against stripes (hello, did you see what I did in my daughter's bedroom?), but these stripes were just Too Much. First, they weren't painted all that well, and when you got up close you could see where the paint seeped through the painter's tape and made a line that was not very precise. But second, it didn't fit our aesthetic. Our dining room furniture is a combination of hand-me-downs from my grandmother and my husband's great aunt. It's not modern or "cool" like the dark blue stripes were trying to be. I have my grandmother's teacup collection hanging on the wall, and we have a cabinet full of tchotchkies ranging from more teacups, to glass souvenirs, to Judaica (Jewish items like Shabbat candle holders and Kiddish cups). On top of all that, the dining room and living room have an open floor plan, and our living room furniture is also a grandmotherly aesthetic (and also inherited from my grandma) - floral couches that I absolutely adore. The dark blue just wasn't working for me.

Repainting that wall wasn't an urgent update the house needed immediately... but it was a project I wanted to do before moving in regardless, just because I knew it'd be easier to do before we had too much furniture and stuff in the room. Thankfully, it was also a quick project, since it was just one wall. In our old house, we painted the kitchen this pretty dusty brownish-pink color called "Cinnamon Cocoa," and I thought something similar to that would work well for our new dining room accent wall, but I also didn't want it to be too close in value (light to dark scale) to the beige color that the rest of the dining room (and much of the rest of the main floor) was. So I had my husband grab me some paint swatches in that general pink color family, and ultimately settled on "Red Clover," a bit darker than "Cinnamon Cocoa" was. It looks great against the beige, goes well with the wooden dining room furniture, and ties in nicely with the floral couches in the living room (which have some pinks in them). 

I made a special trip down to the new house one night and taped the two walls the accent wall touches, as well as the ceiling, floor trim, and window trim, a couple days before I planned to paint. 

Then when we went down that weekend (the last weekend before the weekend that we officially moved in!), I spent about 2 hours painting the wall while my husband and daughter played nearby. It took 2 coats of paint to cover some of the dark blue. Because it was so close to moving day, we'd brought many of our boxes and smaller pieces of furniture already, so there was a lot of stuff in the dining room - and a lot of it wasn't the right stuff (a.k.a. the stuff that would eventually live in the room). But the big furniture wasn't there at least... and all the boxes actually came in handy, since they allowed me to cordon off the wall I needed to paint, to keep our 1-year-old away while I painted. I created a "wall" of boxes and used a small bookcase on wheels as a "door" to allow me to get in and out. 

And here's the wall once it was all finished, dry, and the white curtains were rehung on the window... and all the extra boxes and stuff moved to its proper location.

It looks even better with the furniture and decor in the room!

I love the way it turned out - just like repainting stripes in my daughter's room, this felt like taking a bit of our old house to the new house with us, since we used one of our favorite colors we painted in the old house as a basis for what this accent wall would be. I think it works great with our furniture!

Recreating the Nursery

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:

Doesn't the room just look so much brighter and happier with yellow and orange than it did with those pink walls? I have nothing against pink in general (though I do find it far too cliche for a baby girl's nursery)... but the pinks the previous owners selected were really "cool" pinks (meaning pinks that leaned more purple/blue than red) and it made the room look dark and a bit depressing for a toddler's room. I just LOVE how happy and sunny the yellows and oranges look! They fit our daughter's personality so much better.

Finally, here are some photos of the finished nursery, once we moved in:

Lots of work? YES. Worth it? Also yes.

Yellow Nursery Stripes

One of the things I was most looking forward to as I planned for expanding our family was painting yellow "ombre" stripes on the walls of the room that would become the nursery. I wanted to do five or six stripes (we decided on five), with the lightest yellow for the top stripe and a medium-dark yellow for the bottom stripe, and gradual shades of yellow slowly getting darker in between.

The room was originally being used as an extra storage room, so earlier in the summer my husband and I went through and moved everything out, throwing old useless items out (or recycling them when possible) and finding new places in the house to keep other items. We also took down the closet doors because I wanted to have an open closet for the nursery, and got rid of the old floorboards and closet door trim, which were falling apart and/or had paint drips all over them. I wasn't pregnant yet when we started our organization/remodeling project, but we were planning to start trying and were hoping I would be soon.

I was pregnant before the room was ready to paint. I'd been looking forward to painting it - but I was also concerned, now that I was in the first trimester of pregnancy, about inhaling paint fumes. I read probably a dozen articles online, most of which said the types of painting used for interior walls today is harmless and fine to use during pregnancy. But there were a few that cautioned against painting too much during the first trimester, when all of the baby's important organs were forming, and being overly cautious I decided to wait until I was past my twelfth week. We put our painting project on hold.

Then I had a miscarriage (which I discussed at length in this earlier post). I tried to "do everything right" and avoided inhaling paint fumes - but I still miscarried anyway. I didn't think much about that nursery for a couple weeks as I went through the initial emotions and stress and went forward with getting a D&C procedure. But once I was feeling physically recovered, I realized I still really wanted to paint that future nursery. It was late September. I wanted to paint it before the weather got too cold, so I could paint with the window open. I wanted to paint it before I got pregnant again, so I didn't have to worry again about inhaling the fumes during the first trimester. Most importantly though, I wanted to paint it as part of my healing process.

Maybe it seems weird to plan and paint a nursery when I wasn't pregnant anymore, but to me it felt meaningful. (And I only cried a little while I was doing it...) It was a conscious decision to look toward the future, to embrace my dreams of parenthood, and try to believe that I would get pregnant again and we would have children someday. I don't know when we'll have a baby sleeping in that room - but whenever it happens, the walls are already painted and ready.

My husband helped with the measurements. It turned out our floor wasn't totally level, so we made all the measurements from the same corner of the room, and then used a long level to draw straight lines out from there around the perimeter. I selected five colors of yellow - two from one swatch and three from another swatch. The names were (from lightest/top stripe to darkest/bottom stripe): Lemon White, Meringue, Storm Lightning, Solar Energy, and Radiant Sun. We bought a quart of each color.

Once we had our stripes measured and marked in pencil, we used painter's tape to get straight lines. I planned to paint the top, middle, and bottom stripes first.

We had already painted the ceiling white and had a ceiling fan/light installed several weeks earlier. We put a line of tape on the edge of the ceiling, and then on the bottom of the topmost pencil line. For the middle stripe, the painters tape went above the higher stripe outline and below the lower stripe outline. For the bottom stripe, the tape went above the stripe outline. We also covered the outlets, light switch, and the edges of the door and window frames with tape. Finally, I threw diagonal strips of tape up on the second and fourth stripes - the stripes I was NOT painting during this first step, so that I wouldn't accidentally start painting those and waste paint on the wrong stripe.

I painted the top stripe first, followed by the middle stripe (which was closest in color to the yellow the walls were already painted), and then the bottom stripe. That was painting day #1.

Then next morning, I pulled off all the tape (except the ones covering the outlets, light switch, and window and door frames) and put up new tape. (My dog Ginny was upset to see that I was still working on this project instead of paying attention to her.)

This time the painters tape marked the top and bottom edges of the second and fourth stripes. I again put diagonal pieces on the stripes I was NOT going to paint that day (the three stripes I had already completed) so that I wouldn't accidentally start painting one of those instead. Because I was now painting against stripes I'd already finished, I also put two layers of painters tape up, so I would be less likely to accidentally spill paint over the tape and onto the finished stripes.

I painted the second stripe from the top, and then the fourth stripe from the top. That was painting day #2.

On painting day #3, I pulled all of the tape off and went around by hand making touch-ups in the few spots where a little bit of paint leaked through/under the tape and onto another stripe. (Ginny was once again upset to see that I was STILL painting instead of paying attention to her.)

When all the paint was dry, my husband installed a new light switch and light switch cover, and new outlets and baby-proof sliding outlet covers. (The old ones were all cream-colored, and I wanted white.) We also had new white baseboards and white trim around the closet doorway installed by a handyman.

Here's the finished product!

Obviously there's still a lot to do before it'll be a nursery (not least of which is - get pregnant again). Right now there's only an area rug and two wooden bookcases in there. But I love, love, LOVE how the yellow ombre stripes turned out. They're just what I wanted for our future nursery.