I found an image I liked online - something that fit with our jungle themed nursery bedding (same bedding Nathan & Faith used). The image was part of a vinyl wall decal place... they were selling it for almost $100 and it wasn't as big as I wanted. I figured, I could replicate it and do my own twist on it. So I printed it out, enlarged it, took it to Office Max to make a $.46 transparency and then borrowed an overhead projector from our church. Voila - I could trace that and then paint in the lines.
Day 1 - after I traced, Faith helped me paint. She painted the door while I painted the wall. She had pretend paint, I had the real stuff ;-) And she didn't seem to mind. Nathan, on the other hand, knew the difference and was not about to be fooled... lol So this was the only day I worked while the kids were awake. Every day after, I painted while they napped - and that way we had no fights over who got to paint what. Plus, it was fun to see them wake up and see the changes to the nursery and go "wow!" :)
I got pretty far on Day 1 - impressing myself! But I also spent about 3-4 hours on this.
Day 2 - I painted for about an hour during nap time.
The monkeys got faces and most of the leaves were finished, too.
Plus, some areas got a second coat.
I tried to make the monkeys match our nursery bedding pattern as best I could
(minus the swirly ears, I thought that would look a little silly).
Day 3 - I added some birds, falling leaves and a vine to help give the mural some balance.
Day 4 - I obsessed over what to do next... Should I hang the baby's name over the crib, or put a verse there? Obviously, I decided on a verse.
Day 5, I played with fonts and verses, decided on something, had a new transparency made and traced it out on the wall.
Then Day 6 & 7 I painted the verse.
When all was said and done, I spent just over $7 on materials, and about 8-9 hours of labor. And we have a pretty awesome nursery wall. Plus, I enjoyed painting it! I'm pretty tickled that I got something FAR better than the $100 tree some website was selling, and did it all for $7 ;) Now I want to tackle another room... but not so sure Jacob will be up for that, he reminds me "one day we'll have to paint over that... and that will be a lot of work." True.... and it's not like there's not a million other projects to tackle first.
Here's the rest of the finished nursery. Minus the closet - I need to make curtains for the closet and organize the pile of stuff in there. If there's time and $, I may make better curtains for the window, too - something that matches better.
Now baby just needs a little organization. A little more laundry (who knew spit up stains reappear after sitting in storage for 2 years?!? gotta make them disappear again...).
Oh, and she needs a name. Any suggestions?? not like we'll listen... but I'm always open to hearing new name ideas, seems like we keep coming back around to the same old names that we keep saying "no" to....
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