Best Laid Plans



When we bought the Dream House we had a little time between closings, so we had the opportunity to paint the bedrooms before we moved in.  I had promised the eldest, who was reluctant to move, that he could have a red stripe on the wall of his new room.  That was before we found the house and the picture frame moldings made fulfilling the promise tricky, so we painted the inside of the doorway to the dressing room red.

The nursery was the same green in this house as the last and all the hand-me-down bedding moved in as well.  (It has since evolved to a "big-boy" room.)

In between the two, in the southwest corner of the house, is a room without a closet.  Technically not a bedroom and not very big it is likely that it was originally some sort of work room.  It was not a maid's room, certainly, but was equipped with a built-in ironing board.  It became the playroom.  The color, chosen from a stripe on the bathroom paper, never seemed right.  Too bright, too acidic, too, well, too.  But I didn't want more blue and I wasn't sure what to put between those two rooms, one with the red accents and the other green, that would provide a bit of harmony and not ho-ho-ho.  

Recently, the room had devolved to a jumbley mess and the color was grating and it is in the back of my mind that someday one of the boys will want to move in.  Time for a change.

This was around the end of last year.  I thought it would be grand to paint during Christmas vacation.  I love to paint, the boys could help, tra-la, tra-la.  Trolling for something else I flipped past Albert Hadley's room for the Kips Bay show house in 2001 and found the answer.  


The clean white wall was appealing.  Trixie, the fabric pattern, was irresistible.  And the combination of green and red seemed right and not at all holiday.  I ordered memos of both paper and fabric.  I'm in a full-on love affair with both, but they were too expensive for the playroom.  Also, wallpaper in that room seemed folly.  But there I was with three weeks on my hands.  Three wintery weeks.  Why not paint the pattern on the wall?

Dots and a starburst.  Easy!  Well, no.  Dots were easy, but my starbursts were, let's say, unpredictable.  I decided to stamp.  I looked high and low to no avail so I had one made, which may have saved me in many ways.

I ordered a custom acrylic stamp from Village Impressions.  Fast, easy, inexpensive and the acrylic back allowed me to see through so placement was consistent.  Three weeks?  No.  Not even three months, but I did finish in time for summer vacation.

(Stay-tuned for the finished product.  It took five months - you didn't think I'd give it all away in one post did you?)

Hadley images from Albert Hadley, The Story of America's Preeminent Interior Designer by Adam Lewis.

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