Remodeling the House: The Nursery

When we moved into our house after we got married in 2006, we used this second bedroom as our room for awhile because it had a fan and the fan in our room hadn't been installed yet.



June 2006
Before we moved in, the room was storage..obviously =)





Wow, now isn't that a romantic master bedroom?



This is the view looking into the room from the hallway.

Once our room was finished, we moved into the real "master bedroom." There's really nothing master about it, but we sleep there, and we are the master's of the house, so there you go.

Once we moved across the hall, the room became an office and a catch all room for pretty much everything else. And to be honest, I kind of missing having a room with no purpose in my house.

Then we decided to have a baby. And have a baby we did. So the no purpose room now became the baby room. Everything had to go. Strangely enough, I don't remember most of that process. That must have happened during the 5 terrible months of morning sickness. I could tell you where most of this crap ended up, but really-- you wouldn't care.

 When we talked about remodeling the nursery the first thing that we agreed on was that we wanted to keep it neutral and not look too babyish. We did find out that we were having a girl, but we wanted to keep the room a neutral color so 1) when we have another child we don't have to paint again 2) sometimes they are wrong 3) if we move it's not obnoxious. On a side note, have you ever looked at houses online and seen all those rooms painted pink? I love pink, but man, most of them are just not Pottery Barn pretty. 4) We like neutral. A. Lot.  DH has been talking about doing board and batten forever I think. Pretty much our entire house is covered in wood of some sort, so this idea did not come as a shock to me. He decided that's what he wanted to do in this room. I had my doubts about how tall it would be and if there would be enough color to make the room not look white, etc, but he has this amazing ability to see what things can become and I just do not have that ability. I'm lucky he even let me help pick out the paint color. So here we go..

 

A door: it sounds kind of crazy, but for the longest time we didn't have any doors on our bedrooms. It was never really a problem when it was just the two of us, but now with a baby on the way, we needed a quiet place for the baby to sleep.

 

The view looking in from the hallway.

 

View from the closet: That hole on the right is an access to the bathroom plumbing (the bathroom is behind this wall) In the after photos this is the wall where the chifferobe and rocking chair are (blocking the access).

View from the hallway of board and batten mostly installed. At this point I am having my ah-ha moment and realizing that this is going to be awesome.

 View from the closet:...can you see the bathroom access?

11-29-2009 All the paint is done. We picked a color called Au Lait Ole. Don't know the brand, but we got it at Lowe's. DH had this great idea to paint a sky onto the ceiling and frame it like a window, so we painted up to the point where the frame goes in. That's why the light is just hanging out

 

Here's the view from the closet corner again. That's the chifferobe and the bathroom access is hardly noiceable. OoOh and our Winnie the Pooh bedding! I wanted to keep the bedding neutral for reasons already listed above and also because I couldn't find anything pink that I actually liked until Caroline was like 6 months old. Everything I loved was way too expensive or DH hated it. I love it and would do it all over again. We only got the dust ruffle, sheet, bumper and comforter and I want to say it was all only like $60 at Target! Score!

 Now onto the ceiling.
12-20-2009 The ceiling/sky is painted/framed and the light is hung back up like normal. DH recruitued his mom to paint the ceiling and she did a pretty fab job. She painted in all sorts of little stuff into the clouds that you can lay on the floor and try to pick out. So far we have found a kite, an angel and a bunch of little things, but she won't even tell us where everything is!

Also, let me just say that it is really hard to take a picture of a ceiling like this. You could probably do better..I just don't know.

And this is how the room looked when our Sweet Little Caroline arrived 2 weeks early on January 8, 2010.

This is significant because the carpet had not even been installed yet. So the day she was born the room looked like it did on the 20th of December. When I went into labor it was early on Friday morning. Our carpet was to be installed on Monday the 11th. So DH got up at like 5 AM and started moving the furniture out of her room and into the living room. The crib had not even been assembled yet. I think DH and his dad did it over the weekend while we were still in the hospital or something crazy like that which is kind of crazy, because she slept in our room for the first six months anyway. So..we ended up spending our first week at my in-law's house which worked out really well cause I had some babysitters when I needed a nap..but I digress..

Here is what the completed room looked like finished as of February 20th, 2010. It's amazing the difference adding the furniture and carpet makes. Since then we have only made minor chages as Caroline has grown. The swing is gone, and some of the little nick nacky things have moved around, but other than that, I think it's a pretty remarkable improvement!

While at my parent's house over Christmas I made this name banner for Caroline, and this is pretty much how 'The Paper Heart Studio' started. I took it with us to the hospital and hung it on our door and then when we came home I hung it on her door. It was so cute.

Furniture: Toys R Us Eastside Collection in Cinnamon

Bedding: Target- no longer available.

Curtains: JCPenney Our color is Seed Pearl