Lily's "New" Room

Her name over her door

We moved into our house about almost nine months ago which is hard to believe! At the time, we made the decision to get settled in before tackling any home related projects and I'm super glad we did!  Back in January, it was finally time to begin working on Lily's "new" room.  We had set her up across the hall in her temporary room until we could get her real room all decorated for her.  We knew it would take some time, so we just settled her in across the hall and she did not know any different.

Lily in her temporary room...

Joe's creativity at work as he sketched out his idea for the new mural...

He had some help from a really cute little helper

...who LOVES helping her daddy!

Here is a before picture of the corner where the tree is going to go.

A before picture of where the rocker is going to go

A before photo from the corner where the rocker is looking toward the bathroom door and the door to the landing

A before photo from the corner where the tree is going to go toward the bathroom and her closet

We knew we wanted to do another mural for her and so Joe set about designing another beautiful cherry blossom tree, but this time, he added some little creatures for her as well.  I spent some time looking around online for potential room colors and we eventually settled on a bright green color.  We had a lot of pink things already, so we wanted a color that would go well with what we already had since we were on a pretty tight budget and the bright green ended up being perfect.  It is a cheerful color that really makes the pink 'pop'.  (We used all Home Depot paint, they color matched a Benjamin Moore color called Stem Green for me for the walls and then we used paint samples from Home Depot for the blossoms and creatures).  The color appears almost neon in some of the pictures, but it is just a bright, cheerful green.

The room was originally a lighter shade of green and I initially thought we would keep it, but as we got going, we decided to paint the walls, deepen the color and brighten the room up and looking back, I am super glad we made the choice to paint the walls.  You can really see the contrast in the two colors here.

my helper...

We painted the room, and then began chalking out the design on the wall.  If you have never painted a mural, I would really recommend using chalk to draw it onto the wall- it works well and is easy to wipe away when you are finished.  We had a little color swatch on the wall to see how the colors we picked out for the various creatures and blooms were going to look.  This process took us several months. Literally.  Not because it was so difficult, but more because we just worked on it every now and again...a little bit here and there.  We realized that with no deadline (ie. new baby being born) we did not have as much motivation.  But then, my dad's retirement party emerged on the horizon and we wanted to be done with everything before then, so that became our goal.  So as that date approached, we really kicked things into high gear.

Our color swatch.  Lily would run in daily and practice her colors...

some blossoms and the butterfly mobile- a gift from Jessica

One thing Joe and I love to joke about is our levels of attention to details.  Joe, when it comes to the creative process is HIGHLY detailed oriented.  This is a very good thing.  It takes him a while to get things finished, but they always look excellent when he is done.  Me on the other hand, I have the vision part down and I want to get to the "making things look pretty" stage of the program, that is where I shine, so we are a good balance when it comes to projects like this and we work well together.

Lily's initials "carved" into her tree...

a little love bird...

two birds in their nest

As I mentioned, Joe did all of the design work, I painted all of the walls and then we both painted the mural together.  Joe with his steady hand did all of the creatures- which turned out so, super cute! I did all of the blossoms and all of the finishing touches on the room.  

two love birds...

Daddy owl, Mommy owl and Lily owl

A little squirrel who hangs out by the changing table

We LOVE how it turned out, and more importantly, Lily LOVES her new room!  We moved her bed into the room as one of the last steps in the process and she immediately began running all around gathering her books and throwing them into her bed and saying "Up!" over and over again- she wanted to just get right into her crib and hang out and read some books. It was so cute! We laughed because had we known she was going to want to spend almost an entire hour in her bed, we would have moved her bed in MUCH sooner to contain her while we worked!

Her little pink bunny who lives beside her bed

beside the door to the landing...

Looking in fron the door toward the window

As I mentioned, we were able to use a lot of the stuff from her nursery in the other house for this room as well (which makes sense!)  For example, her moon is hanging up near her changing table, the letters pictured above were from her old room and are hung over her bathroom door in her new room and we used the same curtains.  Some of the baby themed artwork is no longer hanging in her room and we opted to not re-hang her little shelf over her mirror around her changing table.  That may make another appearance later in time, but for now, with Lily being such a wiggle worm, we could see her trying to hang on the shelf or pull it down or something along those lines, so it did not make the cut.  The pink rug on the floor in front of her crib we purchased using a Target gift card.  It was fun to add a little pop of color.

We have been asked a lot how Lily adjusted moving to a different room and she has done amazing with that.  I think it helped that she saw us working on her room and could see the changes as we made progress and was excited by each and every little thing she noticed.  We would talk with her about her "new" room and she was very excited that it was going to be for her.  So I think that when the time finally arrived and we started moving her stuff across the hall, she was ready and very excited which made all of the difference.