When we first moved into this house, one of the bedrooms was pink. Really pink. I’m not sure the photo below even really shows how pink it was, so let’s just say it was bubblegum pink as an introduction to why we wanted to change it. (To be fair, the people who lived here before used it as their baby girl’s room, and it did have some cool circular decals on it. But still, it was PINK.)

The initial plan was to turn this into an office/quiet space for me — I will have one of those in my house someday — and Rich and Connor went on stealth missions to choose paint colours in order to decorate it. Or at least it was stealth until Connor came home one day and told me they were going to paint the room black for me. They weren’t, but I appreciated his enthusiasm nonetheless. They were actually looking at some cool blue colours and had all sorts of paint chips to consider.

And then I got pregnant, and suddenly my room was gone and we started planning a baby room instead.

I pointed out that we could leave it pink just in case, but my husband was not a fan of the idea. (Bubblegum pink, remember?) So we chose yellow instead, which turned out to be a good thing because we’re not having a girl (even though Connor still tells me he thinks Hector is a girl).

Here’s a peek at the room reno. (Note: my husband, to give credit where credit is due, did most of the work here.)

These are the previously pink walls (and oak trim, which I don’t love but that’s present through the rest of the house).

And here’s the colour we chose – a pale yellow, and my husband opted for white wainscoting, which I think looks awesome. (And look, white trim around the window too.)

Braggy picture – look at those corners! He’s good, isn’t he?

This piece of the project actually started when it was going to be a room for me. I had seen this idea on Pinterest to put a bench in the closet and I thought that seemed like a cool idea for a room that wasn’t going to need a traditional closet. My husband was game, so he started to build this (and then we just covered the bench in a different fabric than what we might otherwise have used and did something different with shelves and hooks).

Here’s another angle so you can see how deep it is. Kind of cool, right?

Once we he got all that done we started to think about how to decorate. I’m a big fan of wall decals because they’re relatively easy and there are so many possibilities. We used small decals when Connor was born – it was a last-minute pregnancy panic but I like how they turned out. We had a jungle/safari theme in his room, and I wanted something different for this baby. I didn’t have anything specific in mind, just not something overly cute, because that’s not really my thing.

I started looking on Etsy and came across these owls, along with some other similar decals. I know owls are totally in right now – I don’t know why, and I’m not really an owl nut, but I liked these. I pondered this for, oh, weeks and weeks. I showed Rich my favourited choices and he saw one he liked that had a tree with it, and after much pregnancy-induced indecision we finally ended up choosing a couple of the original owl decals I had seen.

This is the placement of the big one. I was skeptical about whether this would work with the wainscoting, but we cut the bottom off the tree and it does work.

This is the trickier part on something this big – peeling the backing off. My terribly handy and artistic husband, however, had a method.

Once the main tree was in place, we added the branches, then the birds and leaves. (Had to have birds in there somewhere.)

This is the other decal we chose – a mom (dad?) and baby owl. We originally tried it above the crib but it didn’t work (which is why they recommend you place first before starting to actually stick it to the wall). It’s now on the wall just inside the door, which I think looks better. (The stripe of tape down the centre is part of the magic method for getting these placed correctly.)

And then we added leaves to this one too.

And here’s how the room turned out:

What do you think?