Thursday, July 12, 2012

I am nesting (just a little).

Ok, the b key on my keyboard is being temperamental. I think I caught all the times it was missing, but please forgive me if you find a strangely b-less word.

The Roommate moved out right about the time we returned from vacation, and we have begun the process of turning his room into the nursery.

My mother-in-law bought us this nursery set (dinosaur-themed, of course!).

The picture on the bag; I think it will look even better with
a darker crib.

All the dinosaurs are different patterns and fabrics, and I am
in love with them. The T-Rex on the comforter is a green
plaid that makes me want to die of cuteness.

Some of them are different textures, too, like this fuzzy pterodactyl!
Too adorable, right? We were looking at dinosaur sets online and this one was my favorite but insanely expensive (almost $200 for a four-piece crib set (on Amazon, not the site I linked to, though still, $150 for four pieces?)? have you lost your dino-lovin' mind?), so we had sort of picked out a couple of other options.

Then we went to Babies'R'Us with the in-laws and my parents to look at the crib we had chosen. I was poking around in the bedding aisle and found this, my favorite set, on clearance! Like, $84 instead of $196 clearance! So we bought every bit of it they had, which was everything (valances, receiving blankets, crib set, changing pad cover, spare crib sheets, wall decals, wall art) but the fuzzy blanket, mobile, and lamp. No Babies/Toys'R'Usses in Tulsa had any of those, except one very beat-up lamp.

BUT! Turns out the Babies'R'Us in Albuquerque had the mobile (though nothing else) also on clearance and they kindly put it on hold until my sister could stop in the next day to pick it up for us. The mother-in-law found the fuzzy blanket and the lamp (best lamp ever ever ever. just look at it. LOOK AT IT) online and paid full price for them, but since she got all the rest so cheaply, that was no big deal.

It is all just so cute and perfect and wonderful I just want to cry every time I walk past the bag. Death by cuteness. Or hormones, whatever.

/End long boring saga of the nursery set.

My mother-in-law is keeping most of the stuff until the shower, but we borrowed the main bedding set so we could pick paint colors and the like.

The crib we plan to get is a deep chocolate brown color. We haven't ordered it yet but have picked it out; we have the bedding, and that's it. We'll probably use an old dresser we already have and will probably also get a changing table (I debate on this). The room is small, and I'd rather spend money on things other than furniture, so no fancy chairs or whatever. This will do.

But, ambitiously, we have a major DIY renovation planned. See, our house was built in the fifties, when people felt the need to only have one shower for a whole house and installed cardboard sewage pipes but also floored houses with beautiful hardwood floors.

However, sometime since the fifties, crazy people decided they liked carpet better than hardwood floors. So though our house has this nasty gray Berber carpet throughout, there's actually hardwood underneath everywhere except in the addition. Our dream is to pull up all the carpet and refinish the wood floors throughout the house...but we thought we'd start with the nursery.

So first we moved everything out of the room. I wish I had taken a picture of it furnished. We had bunkbeds in there (from the DDH's childhood, nice solid wood ones), a dresser, a very uncomfortable rocking chair, and a ginormous pile of law books destined for the trash. Though the Roommate has been living there, it was still where I was storing a lot of random stuff: throw pillows, blankets, all my old stuffed animals, some luggage. This all had to go...somewhere.

Remember that beautiful guest room I showed you a few weeks ago? Well, right now it looks like this:

Garage sale, here we come.

Yeah, you can't even close the door. Ouch.

Anyway, to make sure we weren't getting in over our heads, we decided to pull the carpet up just in the closet to start and see if it would be doable.

So starting with this:

Ok, the carpet's already been pulled up, but whatever.


We pulled up the carpet in the closet:

Shelves removed.
Sanded down a patch:

I always forget how pale wood is.
And stained it with the color we think we want:

Pretty reddish tone, medium darkness.
We also picked out some paint swatches and are trying to choose two of them (a blue and a brown; the greens are for something else):

Thinking of half and half walls, blue on top and brown
on the bottom.
We did all that Sunday. The DDH decided that it will take a long time with his belt sander, but he thinks he is capable of doing all the sanding.

I like the stain color; the DDH isn't sold on it because he thought it was matching what was already there.* I tried telling him at the store that it wasn't the same color, but he insisted it was. Now that he sees that it doesn't match the old color (keeping my mouth shut on that one), he's disappointed. But I like it better than the other color and am trying to convince him.

So that's where the nursery project stands. It could take awhile, but I'm pretty stoked about how nice it will be when it's done. And we have until the middle of November. That's plenty of time. Right?

Right?

This will be the only room in our house that's intentionally decorated with coordinating things; the rest of the house is a mishmash of donated furniture, books, and whatever individual pieces I've picked up along the way. I mean, we haven't even stripped the dining room of it's yellow plaid wallpaper, that's how little we've done with decorating this house. I am stoked to have one nice, pre-planned, thoughtfully decorated room.

(And did I mention the adorableness of those dinosaurs?!)

What DIY projects have you tackled in your home? How coordinated are your furnishings and decorations? Am I the only one who lives with hodge-podge stuff on blank white (or worse) walls? And isn't it funny how we'll do stuff for our babies (at least the first ones) that we never do for ourselves?

*The guest room and the entryway are both still hardwood and not carpeted, so he was trying to match their stain. While I would rather have that color than carpet, it's not the one I would pick if I were doing it fresh. Plus, it's hard to match new stain to old, worn stain. The DDH said at one point that it didn't matter if it matched exactly because we could always refinish those too (plus for now the nursery won't border those floors at all anyway), so I took him at his word and thought he knew the color he was picking didn't match what was already there. But apparently he didn't. Obviously we need to work on our communication skills when it comes to interior decorating.

2 comments:

  1. Ok seriously, every time you mentioned a nursery item I saw all of these amazing dinosaur projects fly past in my head! I'm so excited for the dinosaur-y-ness!

    I like the new stain color; it's warmer than the old and I think it'll match the greens and browns better. Just my two cents.

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    1. Me too! My dad pointed out that the kid will probably hate dinosaurs after all this, but, whatever. You only have a first kid (and the energy, time, and interest to do all this) once. Might as well do it up.

      See, that's what I think too! Though the floor isn't as bad, all the wood in the house (molding, windowsills, doorway trim) has this bright yellow undertone to it (I'm sure there's a fancy woodworkers' term for it) that I just *hate*. I think it clashes with everything and something about the color just sets my teeth on edge. But Hyphen won't paint over the wood, and refinishing or replacing all the trim in the whole house would be a pain. One room at a time, I guess.

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