Baby Olsen's Room

I had grand intentions of writing my blog posts in the "proper" order (new house before, renovation, after with new paint, and finally nursery pics). Unfortunately, I don't have any good pictures of the house with the new paint job yet, so that'll have to wait. Instead, I'll just jump to the good stuff and post pictures of the baby's room. It's all ready for him and I'm just about 38 weeks, which means he can make his grand debut whenever he decides to. Until then, though, we'll let him cook a little longer.

For his room, we had our hearts set on a farm theme very early on. We found a super cute stencil set from www.mywonderfulwalls.com and were able to order both the stencils and the coordinating paint colors from them. We basically decided to do this whether we were having a boy or a girl. The nerdy speechie in me gets really excited about having baby boy's room be such a language-rich environment. We can talk about the cows and the rooster and the pig, learn about all the different sounds the animals make, and then go see the real animals on a farm someday! Yipee!

So we started by painting the whole room sky blue. Then once this was dry, we drew hills with sidewalk chalk and then painted the green rolling hills free hand.

Next, we had to make some decisions about approximately where furniture would go, and thus, where to place the barn. Once that was decided, we carefully stuck the giant stencil for the barn on the wall (using a level to make sure the whole thing was...well...level).

Next came the fun part- painting the barn red! It took a couple coats of paint, and some very careful touch up once the stencil was removed, but it ended up looking pretty good. Prior to removing the stencil, though, it looked like this:

After that, I stopped taking pictures at each step. We added some rows of corn, a fence, some cows, a pig, a goose, a rooster, a hen and her 4 little chicks, a mouse...etc! It was fun times. We definitely spent many afternoons after work adding various animals, and then touching up. But we're so happy with the results and think baby Olsen will love it too! Here are some pictures of the finished product!