Woznation

Since phil and I will be moving to baltimore a few months after the baby is born, we didnt want to spend a whole lot of time or energy (or money) on a nursery here in new jersey.  But I still wanted to revamp the spare room into a baby friendly place.  I decided a ‘Tree’ motif with green and brown colors would be a good compromise for our spare room/nursery combo.  It seemed whimsical enough without being too over the top.  Plus, phil and I had our first kiss in a tree about 8 years ago.  So I thought it was kind of romantic, too.

Since we are renting, we arent allowed to paint the walls and the removable wall decals I was seeing online were quite pricey.  So I decided to take matters into my own hands and create a paper mural that I could put up with some wall safe ticky tack.  Problem was – I have ZERO artistic vision.  So I decided to find a sample of a tree online:

And do this to it:

I even tried to find a protractor so I could get the angles right, but couldnt find one.  But I assure you, I was very scientific in those calculations as well.  So once all those measurements were done – I measured my space in the spare room and found that a scale of 8 seemed appropriate.  I had bought my brown and green paper and started to ‘sketch’ my tree (I put ‘sketch’ in airquotes, because I think that term is reserved for free hand designs and this clearly was not freehand.  But instead meticulously calculated lines drawn on paper.)  So by multiplying everything by 8, I got started:

The leaves were much easier:

Two unforseen problems were that (1) I ran out of green paper and had to go buy a bit more and could not find an exact match.  But the two were really close but just different enough that I actually think it helped give a little dimension to the tree.  So it turned out to be a good thing. And (2) all my pen markings from drawing the tree were on the ‘outside’ of original plan, so I had to flip the design over and the final product is a mirror image of the original image.

Here is the final product:

Im pretty happy with it!  I mean, its not perfect, but for my skill level and less than $10, Ill take it.

We cant decide if we are going to buy all our nursery furniture ahead of time and set it up in this room for a few months.  Or try to get by with just a bassinet in our bedroom while we are in new jersey then buy the nursery furniture once we get to baltimore.  Regardless, we will probably set up a small basket/bassinet/crib in this little nook, under our tree, as a secondary sleeping location.  Along with a dresser/changing table on the other wall.  I will do a full before and after post on the nursery once we have finished it up!