Nursery update

It's time for a little nursery update! This has actually been several months in the works - we didn't realize what a project it was going to be.

Previously, this bedroom was blue with white beadboard around the bottom (er... white-ish. It was very yellow!) But the odd thing was, and I don't know if you can see it in the bottom picture, the beadboard didn't go all the way around. It was like whoever put it up just never got around to finishing. And the beadboard that was up was pretty dirty, nasty and ripped up. We weren't sure whether our best bet was to try and repair the current beadboard and finish off the last wall, or tear it all off all together.

We tried to find matching beadboard at Home Depot to finish it off, but alas, couldn't. So down it comes. Much to our horror, we discovered it wasn't sheets of beadboard that you can just pop off. No no... it was individual slats of wood. That took the wall with it as it was pried off. This left the walls pretty ripped up.

So we had to attack it with joint compound. A couple layers worth. It was messy and nasty and took forever, but helped repair the walls. Then we tried to paint it... but the bottom half of the walls just looked too... smooth. Showed every little stroke we'd made with the compound. It wasn't pretty.

Our solution? This guy. Well, four cans of this guy. Hans did this one on his own since we figured the fumes weren't good for baby. We probably could have used a couple more cans to build up to a good level of texture, but it was expensive and smelled bad and we just wanted to be done at this point. It got the job done, at least.

And here we are! Several months, lots of elbow grease and many many hours later, we have a soft, gender neutral nursery.

Source list:

Bottom half of walls (and chair rail): Glidden Cafe Latte

Top half: Glidden Muslin White

Door trim, as well as the brand new crown molding and bigger baseboards: Glidden White on White

Crib: Graco Lauren (we found it cheapest from Walmart!)

Nightstand: Pottery Barn Outlet

Glider and Ottoman: Craigslist

Dresser: Ikea (Hemnes)

Shelves: Ikea (Lack)

We struggled with how to arrange the furniture in this room. Because both the dresser and crib are rather long, they take up a lot of wall space. And the glider  needs to be fairly far from the wall so it has room to rock. Everything we tried was not working, so we decided to nix one of the two closets and turn it into a little reading nook! We removed the doors, painted the inside, added two shelves and (not shown in this picture) added spotlights to the inside of the closet for easy reading. Now we have so much more room in the nursery and a cozy spot to sit with baby.

Now it's time to decorate! I can't figure out what to do for curtains and/or a bedskirt... I'm debating trying to make something myself. And we have tons of wall space to fill! I'll be working on that over the next couple months - for now, it's nice to just have a calm, clean blank slate to work with.