The Nursery: to prep or not to prep?

As we’ve mentioned before, I’m a planner.  I love lists, order and tackling to-dos (yes, I’m my father’s daughter).  So as you can imagine, the uncertainty of adoption makes the planner in me go, “EEEK!”   

A big question:  should we go ahead and decorate the nursery? Advice on this is all over the board.

"Yes, get it ready.  Make space in your life and a baby will come."

"No way. Don’t buy a single thing until it happens.  You’ll figure it out and make it work."

The wonderful, chill, John agrees with taking the “we’ll figure it out" approach.  Me? Well, all I can think of is being excited and exhausted with a newborn trying to muster extra energy to decorate a nursery.  So, after a few chats, we’ve found a middle ground (as we usually do).

We agreed to move forward with the basics:

Researching car seats (so we’re ready to go in case of a stork drop).  

Printing out a copy of our friends’ awesome registry so we can plagarize if we need to!  

Agreeing on what we want the nursery to look like and moving forward with painting the room ("Porous Stone" by Dunn Edwards...love it!). 

That’s it.  Pause button pushed.  Sort of.

I couldn’t stop there.  Loved the color, but it looked too plain.  I kept walking by, thinking, “It needs more - something interesting."  So after a bit of searching on Pinterest, I decided to try my hand at stenciling.  John was a bit nervous (I have a habit of thinking I’m more crafty than I am) but I assured him, “I’ve got this!”

Off I went.

Here it is (ignore the window glare)!  We both really love how it turned out and think it's gender neutral enough to fit perfectly for a boy or girl! What do you think?

How to do it?  It really was easy.  Since I’m a planner (see above), I read several blogs and merged a few tips along the way that were very helpful. 

First, my inspiration came from Sara at While TheySnooze.  She provides an awesome tutorial and stencil pattern.  I printed it out and transferred it to an extra piece of mat board that was lying around. Since I only own a larger level, I taped my old iPhone to the stencil and used its level "app" to keep me straight.  Nice thinkin’, right?  Then I got my handy tape measure and a piece of chalk.  I marked the center of the wall with a weighted string and then used my large level to draw horizontal chalk lines across.  This was my “backup” to the iPhone level and made lining the stencil up a cinch.  Ultimately it was a huge time saver.  Plus a wet paper towel wipes the chalk off when you’re done.  Wall-ah!

I used Laura Gummerman’s brilliant idea (at A Beautiful Mess) to use a thick white paint pen around the stencil instead of tracing with a pencil and then painting in (it took two of these) If I could hug Laura, I would.  HUGE TIME SAVER.  It needed two coats to cover the Porous Stone color, but a steady hand and wide paint marker meant the whole project was done in a few short hours… and at a total cost of $12!

Now… all we need is a baby to enjoy it!