3-20-11 - Baby Hartman's Room

We have been working on our second bedroom - which will be Baby Hartman's room - for awhile now.  It's slow going, as there have been lots of other distractions preventing us from making good progress. 

But now the room is painted, and it looks great.  Unfortunately for some reason it has been particularly difficult to capture the true color that we painted this room.  If you want to look it up, it's Behr color "Spartan Stone." 

The room started out a light baby blue.  The previous owners only put one coat of this light blue over the previous color, which was pink, and there were numerous places where pink spots were peeking out.   Why are people so bad at painting? 

There were also a lot of holes and other areas where DH need to patch with joint compound.  This job was made more difficult by the fact that our walls are textured with this annoying sand-pappery texture so the final coat of joint compound had to be mixed with playground sand to get the desired effect.  Compared to the attempt made to replicate this texture when doing the office, I would say that this attempt was a major success.  (The office patch job, while not horrible, was definitely not quite right.)

You can sort of see the sand in this picture

Then the paint started to go on.

This is probably the best representation of the true color - it's like dark sage green

You might have noticed that DH's shirt matches the paint color.  That was actually intentional on his part, to hide the evidence of any paint that might get on his shirt (even though it's a work shirt.) Solid proof that he CAN color coordinate!

Halfway done - please ignore the devilish red eyes

The paint we chose was not a "low" or "no" VOC paint, and the fumes that were created when he was rolling the paint were intense.  I helped with the edging in the early stages of painting, but when it came to rolling he took on this task himself, since VOC's aren't necessarily good for pregnant women to be around.  Every once in awhile I would pop in to take a picture and could not believe how horrible the fumes were.  Pregnant or not, I'm not sure that it's healthy for anyone to be in a closed room with such intense fumes.  Apparently we should have waited for warmer weather so that we could create some circulation with open windows, but we were on a mission, and wanted to get this done.

I don't have a picture of the finished product.  Well actually I do, but it was bright outside that day and my camera was overcompensating for the light in crazy ways, so the walls just look dark gray instead of green.  The color is slightly darker than I had originally thought it would be, but overall it's a great, gender neutral color for any room and I'm happy with the choice!