House Projects After Baby

We bought our house almost two years ago and spent a lot of the first year making it our own. We painted practically every room and have somehow accumulated a lot of additional "stuff" despite my attempts at constantly getting rid of things because I don't want clutter. We still have lots of projects on our list. When we found out we were pregnant, we started talking about the nursery, formerly known as the guest room. I have done most of the painting in the house, because on the project list, that is something I can do. Nicholas handles the power tools and hanging things that require measurements. I absolutely refuse to measure something to hang it. Fortunately, I have a pretty good "eye" for hanging things straight. Nicholas is impressed. I digress...So, being pregnant, I wasn't supposed to really be painting anymore. That was frustrating, since there were still some important things that needed to be painted!
Back to the nursery...I spent a lot of time searching around on the Internet trying to figure out how I wanted to decorate the nursery. I was pretty anti-theme. Why? I suppose I don't really like themes. I also wanted to try to maintain as much of our identity in our house as possible and not have all the crazy kid stuff everywhere...at least for as long as possible! Once we found out we were having a boy, I was adamant that we not decorate the room in "boy" colors like primary red and blue. Do you know how hard it is to find ideas for boy rooms that don't include blue and red or "themes"? Practically impossible. I finally found a valance at Buy Buy Baby that I settled on. We picked a light yellow color for the wall paint. We had to prime the walls before painting them because there was a dark grey color on them that was going to show through the light yellow. We had to remove the "glow in the dark" stars from the ceiling so it could also be painted. Nicholas redid the closet with some built in shelves and strong clothing rods.
Then we had baby showers. I had registered for some room decorations, but we didn't receive any. It is just as well since once we got the car seat with an awesome black, yellow, white, and grey pattern, I decided that was how I wanted the nursery decorated. This didn't actually mean we had to do any backtracking (other than returning the valances we had already bought). In January, I blogged about how far we made it in the nursery before the baby arrived. To recap:

• Nicholas redid the closet with built in shelves. The shelves and the closet were painted.
• The bedroom was primed and painted (3 coats of paint).
• Glow in the dark stars were removed, and the ceiling was painted.
• The futon got a new cover.
• We bought fabric for the curtains.

Nicholas was so busy making art for the first few months of Lil' D's life that readdressing the nursery was not a reality. Then we were really busy in May between flying to Colorado and having two sets of visitors. Now our story begins two weeks ago. The trim in the nursery needs to be painted white (from an aqua blue). When I painted the aqua blue, it almost immediately got scratched because the paint didn't stick very well to all the other layers of paint already on the trim. So...Nicholas and I bought some eco-friendly paint stripper. Without drawing out the story, here are the issues we encountered:

• Stripping paint off of trim attached to the wall is tough work.
• Taping off the area we wanted to strip (and protect the newly painted walls) is futile.
• Stripping paint in the grooves of trim is ridiculously hard.
• Trying to strip paint off of baseboards that have been tiled and grouted to the floor is silly. The previous owner put tile floors throughout the upstairs but failed to remove the baseboards first. Instead, he just grouted to the baseboards. This looks silly for lots of reasons, makes it difficult to paint the trim, and makes it even harder to remove the paint from the trim.
• Several coats of paint stripper had to be applied to be really effective.
• The stripper may be eco-friendly and all citrus smelling, but it was pretty vapor-y and smelled like Florida hopped up on pesticides.

This comedy of errors took us from a project we thought we could get done in a couple of days with a little hard work to a weeks long project with a billion added steps. Since the paint stripper wasn't as effective as we were hoping, we have spent a week trading off scraping for 30 minutes to an hour at a time because it is most definitely not something you can do with the baby in tow. Now the project looks like this:

• Nicholas removed the baseboards but left the trim around the window, door, and closet. Instead of being able to remove the baseboards relatively easily, he had to cut them with a saw to try to preserve as much grout near the trim as possible.
• Now we have to find baseboards that are thick enough to cover the floor and high enough to cover some of the peeled wall paint.
• The remaining trim still has an hour or two left of paint removal work to get it to a state to be painted.
• New baseboards need to be installed.
• Some areas of grout need to be repaired, depending on what type of trim we get.
• Everything needs to be caulked/re-caulked.
• Wall areas where paint peeled need to be repaired and the wall needs to be repainted in those areas.
• All the trim needs to be painted.
• The floors and walls need a good cleaning to get rid of any accumulated dust.

Of course, the week we begin to address the nursery is the week that Lil' D needs to start sleeping there! For the time being, he is sleeping in the pack 'n play in my office. And this week, Lil' D had his first fever, so that made nursery progress slow going. Once the trim is in and painted, we can put together the crib, hang stuff on the walls, and finally get Lil' D moved into his room! Hopefully you will find completed nursery pictures by the beginning of July!