Phoebe's new room

With a week to go before the big move, I’m painting Phoebe’s new room this weekend.
I had forgotten how much of a chore painting can be.

Picking the color. The taping. The priming. The touch-up.

We’re not painting any of the other rooms in this place. Just Phoebe’s. And for her, to see the expression on her face when she sees her new room, it’ll be worth it.

We’re hoping it will ease the transition for her a little also.

We’re moving her into one of the downstairs bedrooms in our duplex, which the previous renters also had set up as a baby’s room, with caramel-colored walls. One of the walls was accented with pink, purple and brown circles.

For Phoebe, we’re going with a deep yellow, which will be a change from her orange-colored room in K-Town, but it still matches a lot of her décor … And she loves just about anything yellow.

Although finding the exact shade has been a chore in itself … We’ve always used Easy Living paint, which has yielded us a whole shoebox of color cards and samples. Since Sears stores carry Easy Living and there are Sears stores in K-Town and The ‘Ville, we figured -- No problem. Kates could pick a color, tell me what she wanted and I would find it here.

But when I went to the store to retrieve the color -- Natural Blonde -- I discovered they only carried Valspar. And no other store in town carried Easy Living.

So I sent Kates to the K-Town Lowe’s store, which carries Valspar, and she found a similar color there. She relayed the new color -- Golden Butter -- to me and the next day I returned to The ‘Ville store to pick up the paint.

But I couldn’t find the paint color. When I asked a saleswoman about it, she asked, “Where did you find the color?” When I told her Kates found it at Lowe’s, the woman nodded her head and explained that Valspar sends different colors to different stores. Seriously.

Nonetheless, I purchased a can of primer, unpacked the box of paint supplies I’d brought back with me during my trip a couple weeks ago, and I started the transformation on Phoebe’s room last night.

Kates finally just dropped the paint color she likes in the mail, and I’ll do my best to match it with something I can find here this weekend …

Phoebe’s new “big girl” bed also is on its way. After a maddening afternoon of trading text messages with Kates, while she searched for beds at Ikea and Target earlier this week, we found the perfect bed for Phoebe during a search of the interwebs.

Stay tuned.