Nursery Plans

It's official, people.  Baby Williams is a boy, and he's due to arrive in about four months.  It's time to start thinking about a nursery.

We're actually a little ahead of the game.  When Steve's grandmother moved to a new assisted living facility in January, she upgraded to a full size bed.  The full size bed that had been in our guest bedroom, to be exact.  Since all of her linens were intended for a twin size bed, we went ahead and sent everything with the bed- the linens, the matching curtains and rod, the matching dresser and night stand, and the library table.  The end result is a rather bare room- perfect for starting from scratch.  Well, almost bare... we used a gift card to purchase the light-diffusing cellular shade for privacy reasons shortly after the curtains made their way to Grandma's new place.

Nice and bright, but neighbors can't see in.

The one thing we do have in this room at the moment is a box full of crib and another box full of crib mattress.  You can get a sense of scale of how small this room really is just by looking at the boxes on the floor.

Crib stuff.

There are very few things we're sure about with baby's room so far.  Neither of us really like the idea of a theme, so we're going to aim for a color palette instead.  We've got our crib picked out, and it's white.  Steve really wants to use a tallboy dresser his dad built in baby's room, and it's a light maple color (Steve is opposed to painting the dresser).  We'll need a rocker and a changing table and some room-darkening curtains.  We want to install crown molding in there.

Closet and the door to the hallway propped open.

Pretty much everything else is up for negotiation.  We love the idea of painting a sky and clouds mural on the ceiling.  Right now we are leaning toward a color palette that is mostly grays and whites with aqua blues and a few fun kicks of orange.  We are thinking the crib will end up on the longest unimpeded wall (not the wall it's pictured against now).  I'm totally digging the idea of doing a striped accent wall, but not sure how it would look with a busy ceiling and in such a small room.  We are struggling with what to do about the fuse box (I've said it before and I'll say it again- who puts a fuse box in a bedroom??!?) and we're feeling the need to go through the closet, which is packed to the gills with seasonal items, gift wrapping supplies, and random odds and ends.

So for now, here are some of the images that are serving as points of  inspiration for our nursery.

Love how calming this room is, with the fun pops of orange. {via}

My absolute favorite inspiration photo.  {via}

Gorgeous subtle cloudscape ceiling.  {via}

Obviously I am digging the striped wall thing.  {via}

Should be fun to get our little boy's room put together into someplace functional, peaceful, and a little whimsical.

Guest Bedroom: Move In to Present, Really.

One thing about living in a relatively small 3 bedroom house- the bedrooms aren't that big.  The floor plan of our guest bedroom is essentially a mirror image of the bedroom that's currently serving as our office.

The office before- vanilla.

There's a window on the wall opposite the door, a closet to your left, and that's about it.  The only real difference is that the guest bedroom sits behind the laundry closet, so the guest bedroom is about a foot and a half narrower than our office.  And the fuse box is in the guest bedroom.  (Who thought that was a good idea??)

Although we don't host guests often (Tabi was the first guest we've had since we moved in 16 months ago), we wanted to have a functional guest room just in case.  We also wanted to avoid having our guest room turn into a junk room like the guest room in our first house did.  As you can see from this photo last August, keeping it clean is a constant struggle for us.

Looks like an episode of Hoarders.

However, we managed to get things cleaned up, donated, Craigslisted, or put away for Tabi's visit and tackle a few neglected little projects in this room.  Here's how things look now.

Ready for visitors!

We painted this room Kilim Beige from Sherwin Williams just like the office way back when we moved in and traded out the brass boob light for a less obnoxious (and super cheap) oil-rubbed bronze one from Lowe's.  All of the furniture in this room is hand-me-down or borrowed.  The bed frame, mattress, and nightstand used to be my Gram's.   The curtains, comforter, sheet set, and throw all came from Target on super-sale last fall.  We already had the pillows, so I was happy they could find a home in this room.  There's a leather bin on the lower shelf of the nightstand for clean linens, and a basic alarm clock, framed picture of a pretty landscape, and Tiffany-style lamp on the top.  The framed still life hanging over the headboard was one of the first decor purchases I made for our previous house.  My friend Laura helped me pick out the print and the frame, and I still love it. Until Tabi's visit, it had been leaned up against the wall in this room, waiting to be hung.  Three cheers for motivation!

Just hanging around.

On the other side of the bed, there's a library table that Steve's mom made that I loooove.  We couldn't find a place for it to live in the rest of the house where it wouldn't be obstructing traffic, so it came to find a home in the guest bedroom.  Luckily for us, the natural finish looks really nice with Gram's bedroom set.  We already had the candlestick lamp and the mirror.  The preserved boxwood topiary was snatched up on clearance from Target after it had been calling my name all spring and summer.

Cord management, anyone?

On the opposite wall from the bed, closest to the doorway, there was a little sliver of wall.  Gram's tallboy lives there.  It is juuuust narrow enough and there's juuuuust enough space between the chest and the bed.  Everything that lives on top of the chest are items that we already had.

Tight fit.

Although our guest room isn't plush, it's functional and looks nice enough.  At this point, there's not much left to do with this room.  The door is a little difficult to close- we think the contractors' drippy paint job on the casing is to blame.  One of these days I'll sand it down and repaint it, but for now we open and close that door so infrequently that it isn't really worth the effort yet.  And this room may eventually be a nursery, so there's not much point in really trimming things out.  Besides, keeping it from turning into a room-sized junk drawer will keep us plenty busy!

Invasion!!

At least it's a welcome invasion!

My sister-in-law is tying the knot on December first and needed a place to crash between moving out of the room she rents and moving in with her soon-to-be-hubs.  So Tabi will be staying with us during the last week of November.  This is so great for two reasons.  The most important reason being I love her and will be happy to see her so often, even if it's only for a week.  The other reason is that it's finally getting my butt in gear to finish up some projects I've been stalled on to make sure our guest bedroom and bathroom are as inviting as possible.

Three projects are standing between us and having our guest space ready for Tabi's stay.

The tub in the guest bathroom still needs to be patched.

Holey.

The mirror in the guest bathroom still needs to be framed out (which really isn't super-important, but once we patch the tub it'll be the only guest bathroom project left before we declare the entire room done-zo, so to take a page from John & Sherry's playbook, "Dude, get on that already.").

Alllllmost done.

And, oh yeah, maybe we should find the bed under all the junk we've accumulated in the bedroom.

*Shake My Head*

We've actually already made a little progress on the guest bedroom.  Between some focused organizing/storing, Craigslisting some items and donating some items, things now look like this:

(Slow) Progress.

Okay, so it's not good yet.  At least you can tell there's a bed in the room.  Wish us luck at getting it all done before Tabi arrives!

Guest Bedroom: Move-In to Present

I decided this morning that I needed to update all of my blog posts by labeling which room or area they were about so that I could easily follow the progress through a given room across time.  I was shocked to realize that I haven't finished giving a house tour yet!  So without further ado....

You're seen the exterior of our house, the entry, the kitchen, and the dining room.  Then you've seen the areas in the middle of the house- the guest bathroom and the laundry closet.

Now let's start moving toward the back of the house.  The guest bedroom is across the hall from the guest bathroom, to the left of the laundry closet.  And it looks like this:

Cue the horror music!

Hmmm, maybe that's why I stopped with the house tour photos?  Ha!

There's actually a bed under there.  Not that you'd know.  This room is full of items that are waiting to be sold on Craigslist, gifted, taken to the local Goodwill store, mended, or used up.  Obviously we don't have overnight guests often, and that may be a good thing... the mattress on that bed is my Grandmother's.  It's about 30 years old.  And when you lie down on it you can feel every single one of those years.

Eventually we'd like to get this room cleaned up so that it's at least serviceable.  Maybe one day it'll turn into a nursery, who knows.  But until then, the door to this room is remaining closed at all times!

I know we're not the only ones that have (at least one) space in our house that looks like junk piled on top of junk.  Where's the messy area in your home?