If you are new to this blog, my wife and I are having a kid, so we have been working on a nursery.  We took the room where my old office was, and completely gutted it out, down to bare bones.  The room was a disaster…crumbling plaster walls, layers of overlapping wallpaper, no insulation, a pull string light on the ceiling, wall sconces with twisty switches randomly on the wall, and a wood floor that was cracked and in rough shape.  This has been, by far, the biggest job I’ve done myself in this house.  My wife has helped a lot as well, but the hardcore stuff she couldn’t help with.  I went balls out.  It’s crazy when you know you have a kid on the way, like someone you are going to raise and care for.  A new life that you get to pass down things to.  It makes (or should make) you want to be the best you can be, and to give the best you can give in terms of effort in life.  You don’t want your kid thinking your a shlub.
I’m a nostalgic person, I never forgot what it was like to be a kid and to use your imagination.  Mine was always going.  I’d spend hours and hours with my toys, acting out entire wrestling story-lines that went on for years.  I remember all of them, its completely ridiculous looking back on it now, but at the time, I know I loved it.  My toys at the time, were all commercial, like He-man, Rambo, Thundercats etc…..but I never really cared about that, all of the toys in my mind had totally different names and personalities that I created.  That’s just how I was.  As stupid as it sounds, I think it was just creativity, something that once you get a taste of, it never leaves you.  Lets get back to this room…

Nicole and I are not going to know what the baby is and want to be as unisex as we can be.  We painted the room a pretty neutral combination of colors and we will be putting in an oak floor to further soften the room. I currently am in the process of doing the crown molding around the door.  This was one hell of an experience, but I finally learned how to do it!

A royal pain….but it came out great!

     On the wall where the closet is, will be where the crib goes…I wanted to do something cool on the wall.  Like many kids, the timeless tale of “Where the Wild Things Are” was one of my favorites, a true tale of a wild imagination.  I decided to attempt my first wall mural.  I’m not a painter, in fact I hate it.  I never had the attention span to deal with paint, which was why I always worked pen/ink.  This was going to be painted and I knew it would be a challenge.  I borrowed my step fathers projector to help me get an accurate outline of the picture on the wall.  This sort of failed.  Mainly because I couldn’t move the projector back far enough to fill the wall, in fact it would only fill maybe a quarter of it…minus a few facial details, the projector was sort of a failure….I was going to have to draw out 90% of it myself which was sort of intimidating because I’ve never worked on something so large.

For the paints, I had the idea of just bringing a picture of the book cover to home depot and then having them mix me $2.95 8oz samples of every color I needed.  It was really super easy although I’m sure they were annoyed at the amount of samples I wanted.

I’m not the greatest painter, but i feel this is looking OK so far.  If it winds up looking terrible, we can just paint over it!

More updates to come, including new shirts, beer, and Doctor who!