Nursery Progress!

Don was hard at work this weekend so I decided to devote a post to all of his hours of labor and to give everyone who is curious a little sneak peak inside the nursery.

First, here's a little history on the nursery:

Our upstairs has the master bedroom, master bath, two extra bedrooms, and a guest bathroom. When we first found out we were expecting, I chose the bedroom at the end of the hall, closest to the bathroom and farthest from the master to be the nursery. It's a bright room and I liked that it was close to the bathroom.  The next weekend, we spent hours moving around furniture, trying to make everything fit right in the nursery and the guest bedroom. It was dismal. We quit only because I was sweaty and tired and knew Don was on the verge of divorce. (Not really.) 

However, I was not happy with the layout of EITHER room. They were both tough puzzles to crack. The nursery had to hold the crib, dresser/changing table combo, a full-size bed, a book case, and a glider with ottoman. I wanted the crib to be far away from the window and not within reach of anything else, have the changing table near the crib, have the book case near the glider, and have a little floor space to boot. In the guest room we needed to fit two large dog crates, a large dresser, and a queen sized bed! EEK.  It all technically fit but something just nagged at me.

I ended up finding a nifty, FREE tool on pinterest called The Make Room which lets you build your floor plan exactly and then try out different furniture arrangements. You can customize every little detail including window sizes and which way the door swing to make sure it will work in real-life. You can find it here!

I spent about thirty minutes measuring the rooms including the windows, closets, and doorways and then another twenty minutes measuring all of the pieces of furniture. It's a good idea to be generous with your measurements to help account for baseboards, furniture anchors, and general human error. I then put another two hours into using The Make Room and scowling at the computer until it all looked perfect. 

Poor Mr. Head. He came home after a full-day at work only to have me spring my "fictional" computer rooms on him. (By the way, I forgot to mention that after tinkering on The Make Room, I decided that the rooms needed to be switched completely!!!)   He let out a sigh and slowly walked upstairs. What a good sport, my husband.

But you know what? The Make Room worked.  I only changed ONE thing after we assembled both rooms and that was to rotate the bed a little.

I went back to Pinterest for some design inspiration and we both agreed that a vibrant green was the answer, especially since we didn't know the gender yet. 

I'll stop boring you with all of this text and share some pics now. They don't really give a good idea of the finished product since it's still mid-construction, but I think you'll be able to tell where it's all headed!!

Pre-construction, the entire house had faux oak trim and doors. ("Faux" because it isn't even real wood....it's like press-board with a plastic veneer made to look like oak.) In many places, the sun has made the stuff fade from "oak" to "pink gross crap."  After my dad sent us home from holiday vacation with a table saw, we decided to start replacing trim in the nursery.

"BEFORE" shot of fake wood trim and door.

As you can see, there's nothing technically wrong with the trim or door as-is but they're bland and very cheap feeling. I am more of a lover of substantial white trim so this is about the opposite of what I dream about. Was I excited when Don said he wanted to help do new trim? Ecstatic.


Here's a photo off of google that shows the color truer to life than my little camera phone does:

A google photo of Benjamin Moore Basil Green

Here's the nursery with all of the trim removed and the upper walls painted. The color is a bit off thanks to my phone cam but you get the idea. The actual color is Benjamin Moore Basil.

We both love the paint color we chose. It's actually a bit bolder than either of us were initially comfortable with, but it really is lovely. Since this house is going to be a rental someday, we were aiming for something gender neutral and happy. This fits the bill! 

The first thing Don did after ripping all of the old trim out was to research, research, research. I really had my heart set on a very plain, craftsman-style, ribbon trim. We ended up choosing 1x6 pine for the baseboards and 1x4 pine for around the doors and window. I bet you're also wondering what we're doing with the bottom half of the walls?! Ok, you might know from past posts, but we're putting up beadboard wainscoting.

This will probably win an award as the worst blog pic ever, but that's OK. Here's a first look at the door trim and baseboard. I can't wait to see it all painted white!

Not bad, eh? I don't have a great imagination when it comes to things like this, but once the wainscoting and chair rail are up and I paint everything white, it's going to look smashing.  Oh, and that dangling light fixture will get some love too. 

Almost there...all of the beadboard is up!

See that long board leaning in the right corner? That's the two-inch chair rail that will cap off the top of the beadboard. We have it all cut and ready to hang, and I'm soooo anxious to see it all up and together.

After that, I have a loooootttt of work ahead of me. I'm the lucky girl who gets to fill every nail hole with spackle, caulk all of the seams, sand, and make every inch beautiful. Then I get to paint. Joy!  I'll post pictures eventually, when it's all done. We have 12 weeks until this baby is full term, so please pray that I get my act together and get it done sooner than later.

So what did we learn?

1. Cutting long boards and sheets on the table saw takes two people, minimum. Since neither of us knew what we were doing, a third probably would've been even better.

2. Always use eye and ear protection. And if you're pregnant, get a good mask for fume and dust protection.

3. Don't let Lowes cut down your giant sheets of beadboard. Their saws are not very accurate and we wish we would've squared off all of the sheets before hanging them. There are gaps at the bottom that will hopefully not be noticeable once I caulk...hopefully.

4. If you know you have a big, stupid dog who is afraid of loud noises, DRUG HIM IMMEDIATELY before you begin cutting or using a pneumatic nailer or you will find him huddled in a corner shivering and drooling everywhere. Poor guy. I have Xanax from the vet that fixed that right up.

5. Trim work is much easier than beadboard and chair rail, but if you have a little gumption and the right tools, you can do it yourself! Really, you can!


Well, I can't wait to see the finished product. We already love the trim so much that we're considering redoing all of the trim in the house.

It's always nice to finish off the post with some sibling love, right?

Nursery Ideas!

Well, our baby isn't even half done cooking and we've put a ton of thought and work into the nursery. First we got it all set up in the room at the end of the hall because it was closest to the spare bathroom. After a month of musing on the floorplan (which I HATED), I finally decided we needed to switch it to the room closer to the stairs. It sounded simple in theory but it turns out both rooms were packed with junk so it took an entire evening of Don's muscle. He did it willingly but he did mutter a few times about how much junk I have, heehee.

And now the floor plan is perfect. The crib is away from the window and anything else that baby might reach for later in life. The changing table is unobstructed and relatively close to the crib. The bookshelf is by the glider, and the spare bed has enough room around it to be usable. Phew! Oh, and there's an itty bitty amount of floor space for changing clothes/playing/dogs to lay down and be in the way.

So what's next? Well, we have all the important parts and pieces so really we could probably call it quits. Buuuuttt, I really won't be satisfied with such a sterile looking room for baby, and it's a little room so it won't take much for it to be made-up. So what is next is my favorite part: design and decorating!

We both decided that we want the room to be very gender neutral for a few reasons: the first is because this house is destined to be a rental so gender neutral will mean we won't turn away potential renters. The second reason is because we might end up in this house longer than planned and need to use the room for more than one baby. Even if we move before baby #2, we can take all the parts and pieces with and still have a gender neutral room. See how clever that is? :)

We also both decided that we didn't want to do anything to "baby" or with too much of a "theme." I always look at rooms full of monkeys and bananas or pink daisies and butterflies and think, "That's really cute! And the kid will agree for the next 2-3 years. And then what?!" We definitely want the room to be fun, quirky, personal, but also calming and simple. It's actually a relatively hard balance to get just right.

Here's what we've come up with so far! (By the way, all images are from Pinterest and should link directly back to their original pins.)

All of our furniture is white except the glider and bookcase. I'm planning on painting the bookcase white to match with a fun pop of color on the back. The glider will stay the dark wood that it is because it's beautiful, mostly covered by cushions, and a complete pain to try and paint.

The walls are going to get beadboard wainscoting about halfway up. The wainscoting and trim will all be painted an off-white. The doors and windows will also get beefed-up trim in the same color.

Above the wainscoting, the walls will be a green of some sort. We're trying to decide what shade of green and probably won't until we find out boy or girl. For a girl, a softer sage is in order and a boy will probably get something a big darker and more saturated like a forest green.

This is the green I'd use for a girl.

And this is the green we'd use for a boy. The wainscoting here is also similar to what we want to do, but the white paint is a little bright in this picture for our tastes.

I also like this green for a boy or girl.

As for fabrics, we both wanted a subdued, but fun print. Our first choice was a special order birch tree fabric that came in almond and white or gray and white but it's waaaaay out of our price range! (And probably a bit serious for a baby's room.)  Here it is in almond and white:

Pretty!! Pretty expensive...

So what we've settled on is a different birch fabric which I also ADORE and think will make for a much better baby's room when we build around it.

The winning fabric!

Isn't it adorable?! I think it'll mesh well with the green and white walls. And look at that handsome woodpecker. If it's a boy, I'll incorporate a little orange, for sure.

Here's what I think I'd like to use for the fitted crib sheet:

I think I'll find something in the soft blue to make the crib skirt out of. I also want to make some felt animals to set around the nursery.....

Aren't they huggable?!

Finally I'm going to make a pennant or two to string across the corner over the crib out of fabric scraps along the lines of this guy:

It's not safe, in my paranoid mind, to have anything solid above the crib that could fall down, but I think the pennants should be cute and soft, right?

Lastly we'll hang some photos in spray painted frames and leave some empty shadowboxes to be filled at a later date by my creative friends. I'm loving the ones that have the announcement and the outfit baby came home in all arranged artfully in a way I'd never think of like this:

So, there you have all that we have for now! I'm sure there's a lot I'm leaving out, but it'll all come together on its own good time. Like after Christmas when we can afford the tools for the wainscoting and trim, haha.