the nursery: plank wall

The last post, I showed how we made built-in shelving for the nursery.  The nursery originally looked like this:

And then we made built-ins that looked like this:

And now for the accent wall.  I first used cedar planks when I made the frame for the mirror in our master bathroom renovation (which I still haven't blogged about.. oops).  I like the rough texture that contrasts with the smoothness and sleekness of my contemporary style.  I thought it would be cool to do an entire wall of cedar planks, varying in width, and then painted silver.

There was nothing scientific about this part - we cut some to fit the width of the wall and then used the scraps to make it looked pieced together instead of all of them being the same width.  I figured it looked more natural this way and we could save on some expense.

We made sure that the first plank was level and then went from there...

We filled in the gaps with scrap pieces and we bought 4", 6", and 8" wide planks to add some randomness.

This part of the nursery make-over was the easiest!  And fastest.  With a nail gun, it was finished in no time.

I think Ehren was motioning for me to get something for him and I was all "no, I'm pregnant, I can't get up".  Okay, that really didn't happen.

Ta da!  Wall is up.

Even though it looked kind of cool without paint, I knew I wanted to paint it silver to go along with the color scheme of the room.  So first, I primed it with regular old primer.  Cedar is very rough and porous so it soaked it up very quickly.  It was honestly really annoying to paint the wall because of this.  

I used my trusty Martha Stewart paint that I used on the end table update I did.  I started off with "Thundercloud" and thought it was too dark so I used "Polished Silver" instead.

I also primed and painted the built-ins white.  Ahhh!  I'm loving the contrast with the dark walls.  You can also see the spacing for the crib between the shelves.

And now time to put the crib together!  Even though she wasn't due for another 2 months or so.  I'm just slightly impatient.  And Ehren is just a little bit ridiculous.  (Assembly of this crib did not require a hammer). 

It's coming along!  Sorry for the slow progress on the blogging front, I'm trying to sustain a tiny little parasite life and it's taking up a lot of my time.  Cheers!