The Great Renovation: Nursery Finished!

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

The nursery has been finished for a few weeks, actually, but I wanted to wait until after my baby shower when it was full of things to show it in it's completion. Considering our incredibly limited budget, I'm pretty proud of how it came out. Thanks to my family and teamwork in general, we pulled off a dream nursery way, way beyond my expectations.

Overall; it's hard to get a picture of the entire room at once, but this is the general gist.


The baby's bookcase- he has two additional BOXES of books in the closet because he comes from a long, long line of enthusiastic bookworms who've all bought him book upon book. We're also classic children's book appreciators- note the Very Hungry Caterpillar book with stuffed caterpillar, the first of what will soon be an extensive Dr. Seuss collection, and the Madeline hand puppet.


Close-up of the mural my father painted, shooting off into unknown realms from Changing Table Rocket Base.

Now all we need is the final touch- an actual human baby! At my appointment today I was informed that I'm dilating at a healthy pace and, now that I'm 37 weeks along, could potentially and safely go in to labor at any time. It's really happening!! Can you even believe it?

The Great Renovation, Parts 2 & 3

Friday, May 9, 2008

Phases 2 & 3 of the renovation of the nursery are now *finished,* leaving just the fun parts left! The paint & wallpaper removal ended up taking us a lot longer than we thought it would (about two and a half weeks), and the drama didn't end there.

This is my father, most likely grateful that we're nearing the end of our two and a half week "removing 5 layers of paint and wallpaper" debacle


A different angle showing our progress

After all the paint was off, we sanded, spackled, and moved on to primer (none of which I took any pictures of, unfortunately). The bare walls actually soaked up two layers of primer, leaving some parts of it whiter than others no matter what we did. We wanted to paint the blue over a pure, white surface to ensure it's true brightness would come out, but the house just was not allowing it. Finally we gave up and just decided to paint the blue over what we had- and it worked!


Brightest Blue EVER!

After another coat of "Galactic Sky," we'll be putting up big, realistic wall decals of all the planets and a huge handpainted mural of a rocketship (painted by my dad) to break up all the blue. Also forthcoming (depending on how lucky I am bargain hunting) will be a large gray area rug for the floor! There's no way we can afford to rip up the carpet and put a new one in, so I'm improvising. Wish me luck!

The Great Renovation, Part 1

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

As I've mentioned before, my grandmother recently moved from her home of 50 years into an Assisted Living facility with special dementia care. Upon leaving, she left David and I in the house to stay for at least two years so that we can raise the baby somewhere safe while saving up money to eventually get our own place somewhere other than Springfield. I love Springfield in that "face only a mother could love" way that some people love their ugly, mangy cats, but that doesn't mean I want to raise my son here, heh.

This has left us with roughly two months to do crazy renovations here before the baby comes, the first of which (obviously) is gutting out the den to turn it into the nursery. Five generations of my family have now lived in this house, and the den used to be my mother's childhood bedroom. Before that, it was my great grandfathers bedroom when he came to live with my grandparents many, many, many years ago. David and I (with help from my wonderful family) will be stripping off two layers of paint, a layer of blue and pink psychedelic floral wallpaper (<3 Mom!), another layer of paint AND (as it turns out) another layer of ancient, super-thin wallpaper that belonged to my great grandfather. No one knew it was still under there, so it caused a rush of surprise nostalgia for my mother. She says her earliest memory is of staring at that wallpaper (it's really intricate, full of vintage asian village scenes- rice paddies, chinese red pine trees, grass huts and elaborate old sampans), so it was a thrill to uncover it after so many years. My mother even wrote the first poem she'd written in almost 30 years about it! Amazing, amazing.

A little peak at the old wallpaper

Before we knew the gender of the baby (before the baby even had a "gender," really) Davey and I had decided on an outer space theme for the nursery, which we imagined would be colorful, bright and bold. We started to get discouraged, though, after a little while of only finding cutesy pastel sleepy moon and stars patterns everywhere we went, and began to think we might have to take a different approach. My mother though, being the absolute saint that she is, somehow found this, the most amazing crib set ever. It's all bold, primary colors and has ALL of the planets, not just the moon, with their names under them and little space aliens peppered all across it. The base paint we picked out is Disney paint, a really bright blue called "Galactic Sky." We plan to paint planets and stars all over it in a billion different colors as well as sticking this mobile in the window. It's going to be a lot of work, but I'm so jazzed and enthusiastic about doing it that I doubt it will take much time at all.

I'm honestly shocked at how easy it is to cook up a tremendously awesome, literal dream nursery without having to spend a lot of money. All you have to do is be patient, and on the lookout constantly. For example we have this amazing crib, one of those solid wood convertible ones that turns into a daybed for when the child is a toddler and then AGAIN to a full sized bed for when he's older. It normally would be laughably out of our price range, but because my mother happened to find a factory return with no mattress at an outlet store we snagged it for $150!!!! We've been so *lucky* lately, it's the only way I can describe it. It just seems like everything keeps happening the way it's meant to, you know?

Cosmic Creepers (our cat, for those who don't remember) is pretty confused and upset with us at this point, since the den had somehow become his room prior to all of this, unofficially. He had a totally sweet window to guard with a perfectly sized bookcase under it that he could lounge on the top of. The window overlooked the backyard, which is full of squirrels and all different varieties of birds this time of year, all of which he desperately loved to croak and squeak at. Now that he's locked out of "his room" he rebels by crawling all over the old den furniture that's now, for the time being, stuffed into the living room. This is what I woke up to this morning:


Cosmo the Couch King

I'll try to keep you guys updated on the room as it progresses. Also, if anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears for them!