Which, to understate things a bit, was different from the swatch. I still have the swatch actually, and it doesn't look like that. On the paint card, it was a silvery color that leaned a bit blue. The color on the walls ended up being very much, obviously, distinctly blue, which we didn't want because A) it might seem too boyish, and the nursery needs to be somewhat gender neutral and B) Jen wasn't crazy about it, and she's going to have to spend so much time in there that nobody wants her sitting there late at night feeding the babies and thinking "I HATE THIS DAMN WALL COLOR." In a room destined to get a lot of use, and a lot of it when your frustration levels are already pretty high, you probably need to like the color.
Adding to the trickery was the fact that we were shooting for a paint effect that was sort of swirly, like Dumbledore's pensieve. To do this, we had picked out a metallic paint, which we intended to swirl on top of a slightly darker, but still very similar, blueish tone. And the paint guy at the store made it seem like what we "get" if we choose the metallic color, is just that color in two different bases: one semi-gloss, and one metallic. In hindsight, it seems like since we came to him with two swatches (the metallic, lighter one and a non-metallic, slightly darker one), he could have just tinted the semi-gloss color a bit darker, or the metallic a bit lighter, right? Like, you're supposed to be the paint master or whatever, can't you just add or subtract a few drops of color? Why does it have to be exactly what's on the card? Isn't color-matching a thing? How do you do that if you don't have the MAAAAGICAL card?
Ugh, sorry. I'm just a bit rankled about the whole thing looking back because it caused us so much trouble later. That's because when we went to swirl the metallic color on top of the base color, it just looked like a bad paint job, because the two colors weren't different enough to look intentional. Major bummer. In that picture up there, if you look veeeeery closely above that outlet, you... probably still won't see where we tried it out, because it really did just look like a poorly executed paint job.
Our next effort was an attempt to salvage the original too dark (and semi-gloss, which means it had roller-marks urrrvrywhere) color. My mom had come across a glitter "top coat" that Disney makes, so we gave that a go, thinking maybe it would lighten the color a bit (or seem to, anyway, by throwing light around a little and distracting the eye) and disguise the roller marks. But....
It didn't make the color seem any less blue, and it just added a different, somehow even more noticeable kind of roller marks where the glitter transferred to the wall more heavily at the beginning of the roll. In those small patches where the glitter had properly deposited, it was pretty, but it didn't solve any of the problems those walls were having. So the glitter option was out.
At this point, everyone was getting very frustrated and overwhelmed and we all just wanted to get SOMETHING tolerable on the walls sometime before the babies graduate high school. So it was time to go back to basics. We picked out a nice neutral silvery color that was similar to what the original color should have been, but erred on the side of going lighter this time, and stuck to a basic eggshell finish with no attempts at anything fancy like metallic. And after a few hours of elbow grease, the room ended up this color.
And it checks all the boxes that need checking: relaxing, pretty, gender-neutral, and not just boring white. There are still some ideas being thrown around, like stenciling some sparkly stars around the room for a hit of whimsy, but those are just ideas. It's a nice enough color as it is, so anything else would just be for funsies.
You can also see in this picture that the floors were redone! That I can take no credit for, as Jason and my dad knocked it out in a day like champs. It looks niiiiice, right? I love a nice dark hardwood floor. And that the first of the cribs is set up! Which can only mean that this nursery is finally taking shape. But there's still a lot more to be done, so be sure to check back now and again to see how it's coming along!
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