Benjamin Moore Project #1 – The Kid’s Room!

I think there’s really no way to explain the decorating disaster that was the kid’s bedroom in our new house – a picture says it all!

The floor was a lovely checkered black and yellow (a friend suggested I should keep it as a game night option, human checkers!) and the walls were a whole bunch of wrong! Half the wall was painted a dark blue with yellow sun and moon stamps throughout. The middle of the wall had a wallpaper sun//moon border, and the top was a bright sunny yellow. I’m not opposed to yellow in a bedroom – it is certainly cheery but I learned with our son who had yellow in his room that it’s an energetic color and not the best for sleep.

I’m a stay at home mom so we don’t have a babysitter or daycare where the kids could go while the painting was done, so this was a concern. Natura Paint by Benjamin Moore was perfect for our household because of the ZERO VOCs in their products. I was eager to use this paint throughout our house but especially in our kid’s bedroom (the two will be sharing a room for awhile). My husband (he did the entire room on his own) was able to paint with the kids and I in the house, peeking in every so often to see the progress. The very cool thing is that after the paint was dry, the kids were able to sleep in their rooms on the evening of the second day of painting. There was no smell leftover at all!

So what color did I pick? The selection was difficult because not only are siblings sharing a room but in this case it’s a boy/girl shared bedroom. I couldn’t go all cutesy pastels and I wanted a color that I could make work with a little girl’s decor. Thankfully I had Sonu Mathew, Senior Interior Designer for Benjamin Moore and blogger at Living In color With Sonu, to help me. We discussed the kid’s interests and what I wanted the room to project. Did I want the room to be a fun play area as well? No. Did I want a bright color? No. Did I like green tones? No. I sound like a tough customer, but I assure you I’m not!
I drifted toward grey tones – I knew it would blend well with my son’s dark bed and bedding and that my daughter’s bright white bedding would be a good contrast against it and also blend well with the baseboards and window trim (I debated bunkbeds for the kids in this room but since it’s so large there was no need to worry about saving space.) The color above is called Copley Gray (HC-104), which I realize is hard to judge on your screen. I ran into that a lot – the color on my monitor was not the same necessarily as in the store so it’s important to go to an actual Benjamin Moore retailer to get a better idea of the hue. Once I saw this color on a card, I was convinced. It has some brown undertones, at least to me, and I love love love it in the kid’s bedroom. My husband also put in laminate flooring and new window/door trim. Ready for the result?

Copley Grey Benjamin Moore Amazing right? As one of my friends said when I posted this on Facebook, “It’s amazing how someone can wreck a room with painting and flooring and then someone can come along and fix it entirely!” This really goes to show that you shouldn’t judge a potential house on the decorating – it’s all “surface stuff” and can be fixed.

We used Natura Primer on the walls first (because of that lovely blue and yellow color blend, plus my husband had to do some sanding to repair some areas) and then 2 coats of Benjamin Moore Natura paint in Copley Gray.

See the wall shelf on the right hand side? There’s two areas like that in the room – ideal for two kids right? Sonu Mathew had a great idea – to paint these two areas a different color than the rest – giving each of the kids the ability to have their own special area and express themselves there. This is a great way to give children their own space when sharing a room. I’m thinking of going a green tone for my son’s area (the one you can see in the picture) and a lilac tone for my daughter’s area.