Curious George Paints a Nursery

Before kids, my husband and I went on a date to see the Curious George movie (starring Will Ferrell as the voice of the Man in the Yellow Hat).  My husband and I LOVE kids movies and now that we have kids, we actually have a good excuse to watch (and enjoy) them.

My FAVORITE scene is when George ventures to the penthouse a few floors above where the Man in the Yellow Hat lives.  Curiosity leads him to a spotless, white-on-white luxurious apartment that just happens to have paint cans lying around.  You can go ahead and assume what happens next...

From that moment, I knew that when I had kids, I wanted their nursery to look like Curious George painted it!  And when I have an idea... it's really hard to stop me from carrying through with it.  That's also how this blog got started...

Anyway, so I enlisted the help of my sister/painter extraordinaire.  If you ever see her, you should definitely compliment her on her lion.  She is very proud of it.

Even though George only painted giraffes in his room, I wanted to add a few more animals to the mix.  So, in addition to the giraffe, we added a lion, hippo and a curious little monkey...

Side rant:  From my experience, orange paint is very thin.  Green, too.  Why is this?  Maybe a scientist can tell me.  Anyway, it take lots and lots of coats... more so than blues or reds or browns... pinks need the least amount of coats.  Maybe it's just me. It's very possible that it's just me.

It took us a whole Saturday, and half of a Sunday to complete this nursery (mainly because of the number of coats we had to put on anything orange or green).  When it was done, I finally had my dream nursery!  (Because the nursery is really more about the Mommy than the baby... Baby could care less.)

My sister then added some special touches to her nephew's nursery... animal print wall letters and a zebra print night stand.

This nursery was extremely inexpensive for us to do.  We used the same crib that I slept in as a baby.  All together, like 7 or 8 different babies have slept in my crib.  (Things were just made better 27 years ago apparently.)  I bought the bedding from Target and it was something crazy inexpensive, like $80 total!  The rest of the furniture, toys, baby necessities were on our registry and given to us by friends and family. 

We also got some shelving for the closet from a garage sale and cut it to size.  We bought a few more shelves from Home Depot.  It cost us around $50 total.

I made a few changes when Leyson came around... a new towel rack...

... letters... of course I had to add his name to the wall.  I used the "E" and the "S" from James' name, and had to recreate the zebra, alligator, and giraffe prints for the "L," "Y," and "N."  It took me forever to figure out what to do with the "O."  I decided on peacock feathers, but no one else liked it.  I liked it.  And that's the most important thing.  I'm stubborn like that.

The final product the 2nd time around...  (Thanks to my dear friend, Harriett, I got a free glider that I love love love!)

Leyson loved his room... as did James.  But Mommy liked it best!  When we sold our house, I cried the last time I walked in and left this room.  I was very thankful that the buyers did not ask me to repaint it, because that would have been extremely hard for me to do.

"Yay!  I can read!"

"Am I looking in a mirror?"