From Dog Room to Baby Room

Since we are expecting our first kid in February, it's about time that I started getting the baby's room ready. In our case, we are converting the Dog Room over to what my wife likes to call the Nursery. I prefer to call it the Kid Room (it seems more fun that way, and somehow calling it a nursery makes me feel like we should also have a study, a butler's staircase, and a parlor).

Note the large sample color areas I brushed out.

The room was a sort of bland yellow in its time as the Dog Room, and since my wife and I both like to go bold with color, we decided to paint the walls a very dark brown. We first tried the above color, a custom brown that we decided was too light and too grey-ish, especially since we are going to decorate the room in a sort of "Where the Wild Things Are," monsters, faeries, and mystical forests theme and we wanted a dark background to set the stage for the kid's imagination to go wild (hopefully in a fun, good way!).

My Great Dane Clyde standing in the
Dog Room before its transformation into the Kid Room

We decided to test out a darker brown and went with Bittersweet Chocolate, 2114-10, from Benjamin Moore's Pottery Barn Fall 2010 Color Selection. It's a pretty dark brown (about as dark as it gets while still being brown), and we like it for this room since we don't know whether or not our kid is going to be a boy or a girl.

Also, we want to light the room up with funky lighting, so we chose an eggshell sheen in Benjamin Moore's Aura. Most people think that if you use such a dark color, your room will end up ultra dark. Well, it will, but actually, if you add a little sheen (like the eggshell or even satin) and light it properly, the room won't feel like a cave.

Of course if you decide to paint a room ultra dark brown, you better not be afraid of a little color! It's easy for me to just re-paint something if I don't like it.

Still, just sample your colors on your walls to make sure you like them--you can save a lot of excess work and money on paint you don't like by sampling.

At this point, I sampled the 2 colors all over the room, something most people don't do enough when selecting color. Put out a little money, buy a few samples, then put them on the wall. Just make sure you apply it smoothly and don't leave any runs or heavy edges since you will see them in the finished project.

Note that I painted a large area in order to sample each color.
You don't need to do such big swaths, but bigger can be better,
especially with a major color change like this.

I have had customers who worry that if they go dark or bold (say with a bright orange or red) that they will have problems later on when they want to change colors.

I don't worry about that at all, especially since we only use ultra high quality materials. 99% of the time we use Benjamin Moore's Aura, which has excellent hiding properties and will  usually cover just about any color in 2 coats. In fact, we usually get about 95% coverage in the first coat.

The 2 browns here are each just single coats of Aura.

In another post I will discuss using only  premium quality paint for your jobs, but for now, just trust me. Better paint will save you time and give you better results.

And in this case, since it is a Kid Room, we also want to use environmentally friendly paint like Aura since we don't want to expose either my wife or the baby to hazardous VOC's and other nasty stuff.

In this picture you can see how grey-ish the first brown looked, even though on the chip it appeared to be very dark.

The Bittersweet Chocolate will provide a better backdrop for either blue or pink accents.

In this room, we are not going to paint the ceiling (I'm being lazy). I'm going to just leave it white since it's in good shape and doesn't need a new coat of paint. On that note, I think keeping a light ceiling is almost necessary when you go with such a dark color in a bedroom. You might be able to get away with a dark ceiling in a larger room with a high ceiling, but in an average bedroom, I suggest keeping the ceiling light.


I will actually start painting the room tomorrow and will return here to show you a little bit of the process as well as some of the tools we use. If you come up with questions, please ask since that's why I am here.