The Best Light Pink Paint Color Meant for Nursery Walls

Alternate title: Breaking Out John’s Painting Belt

It was like old times. For those who do not get the painting belt reference, check this out for further explanation. Anyway, as we mentioned yesterday, we painted Clara’s nursery. And instead of cloning the exact space that she enjoyed in our old house, we took the move as an opportunity to switch up the wall color. We figure since we are working with the same furniture and even the same light fixture and curtains (since I was too sentimental to leave them behind) we thought a new wall color would make things feel a little fresher- like the room is subtly evolving over time as opposed to being totally reinvented (since many of the major pieces are staying the same) or a carbon copy of the last room (simply because we have been there and done that).

When we were chatting about what colors we could do, we debated a few options: some shade of blue (but we thought it would be too much with the blue bedding, changing pad cover, capiz chandelier, and the blue in the curtain fabric), some shade of green (too similar to the past version), some shade of yellow (not present in the curtains or any other items already in the room so likely too random), some neutral color (too safe for a kids room, we hoped to have some lively), some shade of pink (hmm, but is that especially girly? we are scared). And guess what we went with?!

Since there were soft tones of pink in the curtains as well as in our Hands-on mobiles (that we have yet to hang) we thought it would fit in nicely – as long as we kept things on the subtle side so it did not get too bright and overwhelming. But we did not simply want a soft ballet pink (or a baby pink like the swatch in the photo above). We hoped something with gray/lavender undertones. It is hard to explain, so we will let the swatch cards do the talking:

See how the one with the arrow towards it seems grayer and more lavender than the others? We thought it had a pleasant muddy sophistication and hoped that it would not look too pastel-ish and girly, since we have consistently enjoyed that Clara’s room is full of greens and blues and other non-gender specific colors. Not to say that the room is not clearly a girl’s room now, but we simply hoped the color to have a bit more dimension than simply a soft pink. Plus you might remember this whole-house-color-scheme post, where the second swatch on the top row was a little bit pink, a little bit gray, and a little bit lavender. That was what we were going for.

And in person it truly does look dimensional and full of subtle gray and lavender undertones! The color is from Benjamin Moore’s Affinity line and it is called Proposal (sweet, right?) but you know we are too low-cost to get BM paint for the most part, so we had it color matched to Olympic’s No-VOC paint at Lowe’s (which now not only has no-VOCs in the base paint, it also has no-VOCs in the colorants that they add, so it is ideal for a nursery). Thankfully, we enjoy how it turned out. It is a hard color to capture in photos though (the subtleties and varied undertones are not consistently especially apparent) but we did our best. Here is the room before:

Here is the room during painting (simply so you can see our process, we pushed the big pieces into the center of the room and tossed a plastic tarp over them):

And here is the room now:

Of course it’ll look a lot more wrapped up (and less pink-washed) when we hang the art, shelves, curtains, mobiles, etc. And when we switch out the ceiling fan for the blue capiz chandelier it’ll hopefully feel pleasant and complete for the beanette. And now for an obligatory look-how-cute-my-kid-is photo of Clara sleeping on her daddy. Is there anything sweeter?

But back to her freshly painted nursery. Her room was consistently the priority for us because we’d like her to feel settled and we want her room to consistently be a place where we can escape the chaos of the rest of the house (especially since most of it will be “in-progress” for a loooong time). So stay tuned for pics when we get our act together and hang everything up in there for a more wrapped up look. Until then you can find us staring at about thirty swatches on the wall in the living room…