1 post tagged “it's a small world”

I know I haven't blogged too much about it, but I have a baby on the way.  I'm pretty excited.  Scared too, but that's all normal.

Anyway, the wife is letting me theme the nursery to "it's a small world".  Some hate that attraction because of the earworm song.  As for me, I love the colors and shapes.  I'm a big fan of Mary Blair.  Also a big fan of Rolly Crump.  This project is a nice little test for me.  I generally push pixels around all day.  Pushing paint is a nice change.

I also decided to document the project.  Whenever I do something like this, I always forget to document the steps.  The colors are off in the pics.  I also had to adjust the contrast.  So what looks like a mustard yellow is really a very light yellow.  Almost white.

So I started this project this past Friday.  Actually, I intended to start this project this past Friday.  I thought we still had paint rollers and didn't bother picking some more up.  I thought wrong.

Day 1 - Saturday

Woke up and headed to Home Depot before the weekend DYI'ers hit it hard.  Picked up my supplies, including several rollers, and came back home.  I then started clearing out the rest of the room.  Granted, I could have done this on Friday, but I was tired from work and pissed because I didn't have the rollers.  When I'm like this, it is better I do nothing.

I got the room cleaned out and my work/paint station set up.  I painted one wall a very light yellow.  I was finishing everything up when Doug called and told me that I had to go to his house.  Finished painting.  Cleaned up my brushes and mess and headed over to his place for bourbon and to watch "See No Evil" (I had no expectations for the movie and I was let down).

Day 2 - Sunday
The wall was dry and now it was time to draw the design.  I couldn't use a projector due to the size of the room and the fact that the drawing wasn't exactly to scale to the wall.  Earlier in the week I had measured and scaled everything.  Easy, right?  Not so much.  I discovered that my walls aren't straight.  The width that I had measured at the bottom of the wall is about 1.5 inches shorter than the width at the cieling.  They aren't load bearing walls and I'm sure this is common, but still... my walls should be straight.

Eileen helped me get a straight line approx 63 inches from the floor (it is straight and it is level, but the height fluctuates too).  This was serving as my base line and I measured everything off of it.

I eventually got the main outline (or skyline) drawn out.  It wasn't too difficult.  Just took some time.

Then I roughed in the blue.

Day 3 - Monday
Work was work.  There was an accident on the off-ramp that I use to head towards my house off of the highway and traffic was backed up (damned rubberneckers).  My 15-20 minute drive home was a little more than an hour.

I broke out the small brushes and started filling in the rest of the blue areas.  I know that I'll eventually need to go back and touch it all up, but this really defined the shapes.  It also motivated me to see that I can actually do this.

Learnings so far
1)  My walls aren't straight
2)  Someone should make a ladder with rungs that are 13/14 inches deep to accommodate people with big feet like me.  My feet started to cramp standing on it.
3)  This isn't all that hard.  It just takes some time.  It would be nice to have help, but the room is too small for more than a few people and I'm too much of a control freak.