The Interior DIYer
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Picking paint for the nursery – Pantone FTW

A few months ago the lovely people at Fleetwood Paints offered for me to try their new Vogue and Pantone ranges. They didn’t have to ask me twice! I unfortunately couldn’t decide on a paint for a long time thanks to suffering from a serious case of indecisiveness my entire pregnancy [hence things being so quiet around here too]. After much thought I decided grey would be the best hue for the nursery. Grey not only goes with every colour, but when it comes to us eventually moving out, grey is neutral so I won’t have to repaint the nursery. I headed to our local Fleetwood stockist, MRCB Paints on Thomas Street, and got started. 

I took my time picking a grey. I have to say, the staff in MRCB were so helpful, especially re: my constant indecisiveness. It’s no wonder they won best Home and Design Shop for 2016! They deserve a patience award solely based on all my visits.

Our apartment is north-east facing so it gets very cold and unusual light throughout the day which I had a feeling wouldn’t make choosing a paint easy. I’d visit MRCB, pick a few tester paints, paint some patches throughout the nursery, let them dry, view the paint in the morning, afternoon, evening, good and bad weather and if I wasn’t 100%, I’d go back to MRCB, pick a few more testers and do it all over again. I think it took me 4 weeks to pick the right shade of grey, but I was fine with that as I didn’t want to rush into anything. Here’s one corner of samples to give you an idea of my thought process …

1. ORIGINAL WALL COLOUR – it doesn’t look half bad here, but the original wall colour was a weird washed out pink / brown / beige disaster. It complimented absolutely nothing about the room. So, no. 
2. PANTONE ‘NIMBUS CLOUD’ – I was so excited to get started I nearly bought a 2.5L tin of this paint. Luckily I didn’t as Nimbus Cloud turned out to look quite cold and blue in the nursery due to the light the room gets. It’s hard to tell from this picture, but trust me. Paint doesn’t act normally in this room. 
3. VOGUE ‘KENSINGTON DEEP’ – I wanted to see what a darker grey would look like, and for this room, a darker grey didn’t really work.
4. PANTONE ‘LUNAR ROCK’ – just one tone deeper than Nimbus Cloud, I was hoping this would be the right mix of warm and neutral grey. And luckily, it was perfect!
5. VOGUE ‘GOTHENBURG DEEP’ – we grabbed a tester of Gothenburg Deep along with Lunar Rock to see what a pinker hue would look like, but we both loved Lunar Rock once the final testers went up. 

Throughout the room I had at least 3 more test patches in different grey hues, but I didn’t want to bombard you with very slight differing increments of grey. So I’m not going to. The important thing is that we got there in the end. Pantone’s Lunar Rock = perfect. 

That weekend I put two coats of Lunar Rock on one wall in the nursery. As I was finishing, my parents called and offered to paint the rest of the room / save me and my hips [yay PGP :/], so thank you Mom and Dad DIYer for painting the rest of the room!

I’m beyond delighted with how Pantone’s Lunar Rock turned out. It’s such a warm hue without leaning too heavily towards a specific colour. It goes so well with our second hand walnut crib [more details on the rest of the room soon!], compliments the flooring and wooden wardrobes, and works beautifully alongside burgundy, pink, green – basically every other colour I’ve added to the room. A huge thank you again to Fleetwood for offering for me to try your new collection and to MRCB for all your help and copious patience. 
Since painting the nursery last weekend things have been moving quickly and I’m so excited the more it comes together. After all, T minus 3 weeks until bebe arrives! 
DISCLOSURE – while this blog post is not sponsored, I did receive this paint free of charge from Fleetwood via MRCB. I only work with brands and companies that I like and of course, think you will too. Thank you for supporting the companies that support The Interior DIYer. 
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Nursery plans – part 2

I’ve managed to somehow not accidentally spill the beans on the gender of little bebe-to-be. Yet! Seeing as I’m sharing some design ideas today, spoiler alert: we’re expecting a little girl! We were completely surprised when we found out as I was utterly convinced it was a boy [shoddy early mother instinct]. I wanted to avoid obvious choices for the nursery like pink and flowers etc. Maybe because I was convinced for so long it was a boy? This was one of the reasons I fell into a bit of a rutt … 

There are two reasons we hadn’t started the nursery until this week. For some reason [hormones], I had it in my mind that all the unfinished projects in our apartment had to be resolved before I could start the nursery. I made an 8-page list of things I had to do before we could begin. This ranged from cleaning the oven, painting the immersion, recaulking the bathroom, painting the ceilings and everything in between.

The second thing stopping me was the design of the nursery itself. I don’t know how or why [hormones], but I was under the impression [again, hormones] that the nursery had to be wildly different from the rest of our home; a different colour scheme, style and be gender neutral. I don’t know why. Did I mentioned hormones?

Luckily, over the past week I shook myself out of both mindsets. I realised I just want a cute and fun nursery [groundbreaking, I know]. We’re having a girl. Yes, I like burgundy. And pink. This isn’t new. I also like green but I’m not going to reinvent the wheel with our nursery by trying to make it something wildly different to what we already like. I’m hoping to make it fun and cute without it screaming ‘A LITTLE GIRL LIVES HERE ZOMG CAN YOU TELL THROUGH ALL THE HOT NEON PINK?‘. A little bit fun and a little bit Grand Budapest Hotel with gothic accents.

Less typing, more visualising! Onto the design we’re hoping for …

– A lot of the artwork for the nursery will be from what we already have [Bill Murray print, cardboard monogram etc.], will be second hand or from independent artists as much as possible.
– As for wall colour, I’m aiming for a subtle and cheery light grey paint. Fleetwood Paint sent me a gift voucher a few months ago and I’ll be excitedly picking up some tester paints this week. Yeah, grey is a safe shade. I decided on it because it goes with every colour [and I’m hoping to have a bit more colour in the nursery than the rest of our apartment], but also when we eventually move out, a subtle grey paint won’t need to be painted over compared to the living room and our bedroom. Forward thinking.
– Going with my mostly second hand theme, we picked up a standard pine dresser a few months ago for next to nothing on Adverts. I’m hoping to repaint it white at the very least; maybe something a bit more fun. We have yet to find an armchair to re-cover, but im hoping to find one soon. SOON.
– I’m also just hoping to put a lot of fun and cute things in here; hopefully appealing to both babies and adults alike. Some amigurumi creatures, alternative pieces and a handfull of cheeky things that’ll surely make our nursery a lot less worthy of appearing in a magazine [ahem, poo pillow and my ‘Even Katy Perry Poops‘ cross stitch #KeepingItReal].

I don’t have an entirely set design in mind so we’re mostly going to see what we find and do a bit of winging it. But the above are the basics and I’m hoping to build on it as we go. It’s exciting now that we’re about to start, but we better hurry up as we have T minus 9 weeks … ZOMG 🙂
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Nursery plans – part 1

Before I share the exciting side of my design ideas for the nursery, I first have to tackle the far less exciting side that is the spare bedroom as it is now and getting it from this point to an empty room. Sounds easy? It’s not as straight forward as I’d like it to be thanks to us being renters living with our landlords furniture and not having as much freedom as a homeowner would have. But I’ve successfully managed to come up with a solution to almost every problem.

Feel free to allow your eyes to glaze over while you scroll as chances are you won’t find the below particularly interesting. It’s a solution I’ve come up with as a renter so I figured maybe one other person out there might find it interesting, so here it is … 

1. DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING – and everything else on the walls. I’ve found so many cute things to hang up and have some fun ideas, but that can’t start until I repaint.
2. REPAINT – this is an obvious step but it’s something that needs to be done before I start working on the nursery. I just need to decide on a colour.
3. UNDER THE BED – four years’ worth of college work and the dismantled shelves from our living room [as in the ‘before’ photo here] have been expertly rammed stored under our spare bed. Out of sight, out of mind! That is, until we get to number 5 below … 
4. DECLUTTER – I’ll be doing another sweep of what we have at the moment and either selling or donating as much as I can. I’ve gotten rid of a lot over the past two years but thanks to nesting hormones, I want to get rid of everything unnecessary. 
5. DISASSEMBLE THE SPARE BED – since we’re renters and the bed in the spare bedroom is our landlord’s, we can’t get rid of it. My plan is to stack the spare mattress on top of the mattress in our bedroom, disassemble the spare bed and store it under our bed. I also have to relocate the college work and shelves that are currently under the spare bed to under our bed and hope it all fits.

6. CHAOTIC CUPBOARDS – possibly scarier than under the bed; the cupboards in our spare bedroom. They hold about half of everything we own. Our Christmas decorations, more college work, my wedding dress, a printer, our landlords artwork, old Playstations, summer / winter clothes, one hundred years of wrapping paper that’s too pretty to use and mementos to name a few. All have to be ruthlessly culled. 
7. MOAR SHELVES – this random set of shelves belongs to our landlord and sit awkwardly at the entrance to our spare bedroom creating a bottle-neck to the room [which will be v. awkward when bebe comes]. We keep our DVD collection on them at the moment, but I’m hoping to move the DVDs elsewhere and put these shelves within the cupboard [no. 6 above] so the shelves can house overflow bebe stuff that we won’t have room for in the room itself.

If you’ve read this far, I commend you! If you haven’t, I don’t blame you. That’s the plan I have so far to get the spare bedroom ready for its new design and subsequently, new occupant. I cannot wait to share the plans I have for the nursery! Not to mention get started on decluttering and organising and assembling tiny bebe things. 
And for good measure, I’ll end on an awkward selfie …