When Eden was born, we were living in a one bedroom apartment, trying to get into a bigger place. Basically her things just took over the living room and she slept in a bassinet in our room. We finally managed to get into a place when she was 3 weeks old and I had to slowly put together her room. This time around, I was so glad to be able to start early on putting together little boy's nursery. His room was Reed's office/a storage room, so it took a while to clear it out, as we had to utilize the garage first, by putting in lots of shelving. It felt so good to get things organized in labeled containers and to get rid of lots of unnecessary things. Then it was go time for the nursery.
I really wanted to have his nursery be neutral colors- grays, whites, creams, tans, and different natural wood colors. There ended up being a little more color with the decorative pillows (they went well in the room and were just sitting around from our couch that we purchased and used different pillows for). Also, we have a love seat hideabed that we really wanted to keep, if we ever need it for visitors, but we didn't have another place to put it other than the baby's room. It is a blue color, but almost seems gray and has cream stripes, so it works! Even though things are a little different than what I envisioned, I am happy how the room turned out in the end and I had so much fun getting it ready!
The first big project for the nursery was painting his crib...woof. That was pretty time consuming, since cribs have so many slats, but finally I finished painting the crib with Paris Grey Annie Sloan chalk paint and I painted the headboard with a creamy old white chalk paint. Then I finished the entire thing with two coats of clear wax.
The next nursery project was to create house shaped wall hangings for decoration. I found a set of 2 of them at Target for like $30 bucks...which was more than I wanted to spend on them. So I headed to Home Depot and and purchased a couple long pieces of wood and some little hinge nail type things to put the wood together at the corners. Fortunately my in-laws had a saw that they let me borrow to cut my wood pieces and then I put them together with the hinges and some wood glue. Finally, I painted half of the large frame with some left over paint from the crib. In the end I spent like $3.52 total! I also love little woodland animals and think they fit in well with the neutral colors I was going for, so I was thrilled to find some cute little hedgehog critters made out of sticks and straw at Hobby Lobby to put on the frames.
I wanted to make some sort of picture frame with diverse natural wood colors, but couldn't pass up this awesome frame at Hobby Lobby when I saw it, cause it was basically what I was envisioning. So I may not have saved much money there, but I did save some time.
I also, never realized how hard it was to find a lamp...especially at a reasonable price. After hunting and hunting, I found both the lamp base and shade at Target and I love it!
For a changing table, I wanted to use a bookcase, because I plan on collecting lots of books and some other things and filling it up, just like I did in big sister's room. I just felt that a bookcase with a changing pad on top would be more useful and versatile than an actual changing table. Although, I did feel tempted to get one of those sweet floating wall changing tables! It just wouldn't have been practical. I ended up grabbing a natural wood color bookcase from Ikea. I do plan to spiff the thing up one day by adding some vintage legs to it or some other touches, but for now...I am a tired and very pregnant lady and it works great!
The last project I took on was a canvas wall hanging with a wooden frame. I had seen some that you could customize for over a hundred bucks and I found some that I liked at Hobby Lobby for around $20 or so, but they didn't have exactly the quote that spoke to me or that I felt represented just exactly my feelings for this little guy. So I made my own. I don't have a fancy screen printer to be printing on canvas, so I took the long road and printed the quote I wanted on paper, glued the paper to card stock, exact-o knifed each letter out to use it as a stencil, then placed it on the canvas and filled in the stencil. Then I had some oak wood pieces cut at Home Depot and used some wood glue to frame them around the canvas. Lastly, I finished the project off with a touch of neutral colored felt balls. It's probably my favorite thing in the nursery (until my baby is in there of course, haha). I was tempted to go with a Star Wars quote (I love you to a galaxy far, far away, and back) or a few different scriptures, but I kept having this line run through my head from Elton John's song Your Song and it was just perfect. I did change one word from his lyrics that says "while" to "now"...much better...and there ya go!
Cute nursery!!
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