Personalizing It: Nursery Name Letters

Due to Connor’s unexpected earlier-than-anticipated arrival, the nursery still wasn’t 100% finished by the time he came home, and thanks to those hectic first months weeks of adjusting to sleep-deprivation life with a new baby, it wasn’t until Connor was close to 2 months old that we finally got around to putting his little claim on his nursery: hanging his name in the empty space above his crib.

Before he was born I found some sweet wooden-type letters at Hobby Lobby, and brought them home for $2.00 a piece.

I also purchased orange and yellow paint from Wal-Mart along with a cheapo foam brush (the yellow triangles are painter’s pyramids, used for setting your projects on so the edges come out nice).

I wanted the letters to have different shades of orange, going from light-medium-dark-dark-medium-light, so each letter’s color varied and it would resemble a small spectrum of color on the wall.

So I mixed up different ratios of paints to come up with the three shades…

and simply painted them on. But, of course, it wasn’t quite that easy! They ended up taking about 4 coats of paint each to completely cover up the wood (once again, not using primer first comes back to bite me in the butt!). You can see in the photo below how thin the first coat was…

Once they were painted and dried, it was time to hang! Although, thanks to Connor arriving the day we were planning on hanging the letters, we didn’t get around to it until well into 2012. Oops.

We used the moveable velcro 3M picture hanging strips – to save money and because the letters were super-light, we cut each strip into 2 and then stuck ‘em on the back of the letter. Then we simply measured where we wanted the letter and stuck it to the wall. We didn’t even have to be very exact because we could reposition (thanks to the velro) the letter if it was a little off. Super easy! It definitely made us wish we would’ve done it earlier (like 2 months earlier)!

All in all we love it. And Connor does, too. It really adds alot of character and pizazz to the room, and it makes us smile everytime we walk into the room. We can even see ourselves in the future teaching Connor how to spell his name by pointing to the letters up there.

It also adds some fun color and excitement to the very-very-neutral-and-chill room, which is just what we were looking for. And to compare, here’s the room before…

And now:

Not bad, huh? (Oh, and the colors are a bit different in the photos because the newer pics were taken during the middle of the day, and the previous ones were taken at sunset. Big difference, huh? If you’re wondering, the current photos are much closer to the actual colors of the room!).

Have you done any personalizing lately?

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