Lochlan's Room

This post has been a LOOONG time in the making. I started redoing Lochlan's room many months ago, but haven't had the time or bandwidth to upload the photos of the befores, durings, and afters until now...ok, maybe I had the time, but I was just lazy.

Ok, I wanted Lochlan's room to be cute enough for a nursery, but be neutral enough to either grow up with him, or become a guest room or office later. I still don't have any curtains or some of the furniture I want to put in there (like a kid-sized table and chairs and a rocking or gliding chair for me), but I think you can get the gist of the idea.

 The first pic is the before. Notice the super ugly wallpaper. You can't tell from this, but that border has pictures of stamps, and maps, and weird foliage.

 So, I didn't want to remove the wallpaper if I didn't have to, so I mudded and sanded the seams with joint compound. Next time, I'll probably skip the mudding and just sand the paper down at the seams.

 Lochlan snuck in to play in his new room.

 After I prepped the seams, it was time to prime (hey, I made a rhyme! There I go again!). I went with an oil-based primer for a couple of reasons 1)The smell. The room had this sort of musty smell that I"m pretty sure was IN the wallpaper and since I didn't want to remove it, I wanted the primer to be able to really seal that scent so it wouldn't escape back into the room. 2) Because it's oil-based it didn't soak into the wallpaper and loosen it like latex would have so there weren't any bubbles or peeling going on as we were painting or after, so it really "glued" the paper to the wall. And, lucky for me, you can paint over oil-based with latex, but not the other way around.

 Then we painted the upper area of the wall a darker than average, but not too dark brown.

Between this and the next picture, we painted the bottom section of the wall Antique White and I cut some strips of 1/8 inch tempered hardboard (one sheet is less than $10 at Home Depot). I painted those the Antique White color and spaced them out every 2 feet. I was going for a board and batten look. Jaren nailed those on and added a chair rail to finish it off.

I also got these wooden letters to line up around the chair rail to help Lochlan learn his ABCs!