Decorating

This past week, J picked up these Flor carpet tiles at Target, 75% off! We now have almost enough to cover the entire nursery floor (we have 6 boxes after "hitting" two Target stores and we would need 8 boxes for wall-to-wall). We're still debating how big or small we want the rug/carpet to be, but we love these tiles and I'm very excited about having them after reading this post by dooce awhile back.

This purchase confirms something that J and I have been discussing: the nursery walls need to be painted. We received a Classic Pooh crib bedding set from friends several years ago, when we were first discussing having a baby. When we moved into our current house, we immediately chose the nursery and while renovating the entire house (removing carpet and wallpaper from almost every surface, over a three year period) we painted the "nursery" a green that matches the Classic Pooh bedding. However, the green of the walls now clashes with the green in these Flor tiles, and I never really like the wall color anyhow, so it needs to go. You might be thinking that this means our bedding will clash with the carpet, but strangely this is not the case.

Anyhow, I had a brainstorm about the walls. Recently, we attended our monthly wine club meeting at a house where they had painted a basement room (their wine cellar) to look like a much larger, European-style wine cellar. The walls were painted meticulously to look like aged stone, and the artist in the family had used perspective to add doors and windows that appeared to look into adjoining rooms of wine barrels and out on rolling fields of grape vines. My description might sound a bit corny, but it was beautifully done. So, I thought it would be wonderful to have someone paint our nursery walls to look like the 100-Acre Wood!

I've asked one of my 17-year-old students, who is a fabulous artist, to do it for $8 an hour. She's very excited about it, and I'm sure she'll do a great job. Hey, her first commissioned work! :) I'll help her with the parts I can, and let her do the detail work. I don't think it will end up actually looking like this map (painted from above) but instead have, for example, Owl's tree from floor to ceiling in one corner of the room and Pooh's tree on another wall, etc. J thinks I'm being too optimistic that my student can handle the project, but hey, what's the worst that can happen? She won't make it happen and we'll just paint over her work a solid color. No biggie. I'm hopeful, however, that it will turn out great. Here's an example of what I'm looking for (image from a Google image search for "Pooh mural") :