House projects: Vivian's room

Another one of our big projects was to make over our daughter Vivian’s room.  I’ve always been in love with the white wainscoting look, and so when I saw a pin that had grey walls above high white wainscoting, I was hooked.  This is the room that I dreamed about when I put together her room in our old house.  {Click on any photo in this post to see it a bit larger}

Before, it was a nice, clean, just-barely-off-white room.  Bright, but plain.

before

before

Before we even moved into the house, I daydreamed about how I wanted to change things.  I decided that the wainscoting should be higher than chair-rail height and that if possible, we should try to make the top moulding into a shelf for displaying little decorations.  I picked a grey paint color (Grey Timber Wolf by Behr).

Once we moved in, we decided to try and finish the majority of the project before Husband’s family arrived for their Thanksgiving visit.  It was good to have a deadline!!  We took lots of measurements and headed to Home Depot to do some research.  The vertical pieces are a narrow lattice (we briefly considered bead-board paneling, which I also LOVE, but decided we wanted a plainer look). We discovered that moulding is more expensive than we expected, so I abandoned the idea of using true crown molding (which would require three separate moulding pieces to construct) as a wide shelf at the top of the wainscot effect.  After a lot of brainstorming and time looking at the moulding options, we decided to use a casing with the widest top edge we could find.  This way, we only needed two pieces of moulding to make the shelf.  This meant that the shelf itself (made with a wide lattice piece) is narrower than my original vision, but it’s probably better, since it doesn’t cut into the room so much.  Husband spent several hours measuring and cutting all of the moulding pieces, and then I spent several more hours painting them.  We measured the walls and painted the top part grey and the bottom white… and then attached all the moulding pieces.  A lot of detail touch-up later, and it is everything I hoped it would be!!

We met our “deadline”– we were putting up a few decorations the morning of the day Husband’s family was scheduled to arrive!  The final touch– vinyl lettering to spell Vivian’s name on the wall– didn’t go up until just the other day, though!  Here are the “after” photos.

The “shelf” along the top of the wainscoting is wide enough to hold some special little decorations…

paper-pieced monogram and angel figurine

olive wood camel from Israel and rosemaling horse from Norway

china pieces painted by my grandma for me when I was a baby

Eventually, I hope to choose some curtain rods and make/buy some curtains for the room, but for now, I am just so, so happy with the soothing grey-and-white-wainscoting!

P.S. You can see posts detailing my previous decor projects for Vivian’s nursery by clicking HERE

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