Nursery Progress: Grey Stripes

We have finally made some progress on the nursery!

As you may have seen from some of my nursery pins, we loved the idea of painting grey stripes on one wall. The room was still painted magnolia from when we moved in, as you can see below, so Graham started by painting the whole room white and glossing all the woodwork. I then forgot to take a photo of the room before we started the next stage!

To find the perfect grey colour we had previously tried a few paint swatches from the Grey Steel & Night Jewels Dulux Tailor Made Colour ranges against the white in our living room. After looking at loads and loads of grey options these were really the only ones which didn't have any hints of blue or green. We then bought a tester of Grey Steel 2, the 3rd one down in the photo, which we loved when we painted a bit on the white wall, behind our travel map so it wouldn't be seen!

Having read a few tutorials online before we started, everyone recommended Frog Tape as the thing to use if you wanted sharp lines with no paint bleed, rather than standard masking tape. We didn't want to put the tape on until we were ready to paint in case it damaged the freshly painted white wall, so we left that to dry and cure for almost three weeks until we were ready to get started.

Once we had measured the wall and decided how many stripes we wanted, it was time to get taping. The wall we chose to paint was just over 2m high so we decided to have 8 stripes at 25cm each, starting with grey at the top, leaving the bottom white section slightly larger, since it wouldn't really be noticed. Starting at the top, Graham measured 25cm down at a few points and marked the wall before joining the dots with the tape. The first stripe we drew a full pencil line first but then realised that just meant more hassle and more to rub out later. Graham carried on down the wall, measuring 25cm from each line above, to keep everything in line with the stripe above. We put tape along the top and bottom of each full 25cm grey stripe, which meant the areas to remain white in between ended up smaller, as they included the two 40mm tape thicknesses within their 25cm. This helped when we came to paint and as you can see we also taped the edge of each grey stripe with no tape on the white sections.

 

When it was time to paint we took a roller each then got started. It wasn't particularly easy for me to help paint the highest or lowest stripe so Graham did do most of the painting, but at least I contributed! We did the first coat, shown in the first photo, then left it for around an hour before painting the second. There were a couple of spots where a bit of grey paint managed to land on a white section, which might have been my fault, but we quickly touched them up and now they cant be seen.

 

Once both coats were complete we only left it for a few minutes before removing all of the tape, so the paint didn't dry over the tape and get pulled off later. The first photo below shows the wall just after we removed the tape and the second was a few hours later when it had almost completely dried. We were a bit nervous pulling off the tape but thankfully it turned out perfect and we were both delighted with the result. There was no bleeding under the tape at all and the only slight issue was one tiny bit of white paint that got pulled off, but we managed to touch it up no problem and now you cant even see it. I'm so glad we decided to tackle the stripes rather than going with wallpaper or just painting the whole wall grey as we love how it turned out.

 

After we had finished the stripes, Graham built the cot which had been delivered that morning, along with the car seat, seat base and rocking moses basket stand, and we also put the new curtains up. I was so pleased the grey of the cot looked ok against the wall, as we hadn't thought to check beforehand. 

Now we just need to buy a chest of drawers, a chair, maybe some wall shelves, a bookcase and some art for the walls!