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Despite the fact that we now had all the basic parts and pieces of the nursery in place, it never felt like it was quite put together. This may be because we tended to keep ladders and cans of paint in there. it may be because we never seemed to get around to vacuuming up the sawdust. It may be because the furniture felt crammed in and discombobulated and there were boxes of stuff everywhere.
Finally we buckled down and got to work cleaning, unpacking, and arranging. Then we hit upon a furniture rearrangement that made the whole thing work. And, ta-da! A nursery.
But it was still missing something. Don’t you think?
So we went out and got one more thing. We recommend one for every nursery. It’s called an Annabel.
We’re not sure you can still get this particular model, but you should try to if it hasn’t sold out. At 22 inches long and 10 pounds, 5 ounces, it’s the heavy duty solution to all your nursery accessory problems.
When we left you last, we had quit every extraneous project that we could think of in a desperate bid to get the nursery ready for human habitation before the baby arrives. (Which she still has not. For the record.) Much like when we were trying to finish up enough to move into our house last fall, we found that the gap between “need” and “want” in housebuilding can be easily bridged by a little something called “desperation.”
Okay, so forget about the loft and the dresser. What did we absolutely need to get done before depositing a baby in there? The answers were pretty simple.
1) Paint. Although we were using no-VOC paint, we wanted to ensure that any fumes had plenty of time to air out pre-baby. So painting was clearly a first step.
2) Trim. Because who wants to mess around with saws and nails during naptime? Given the lack of storage in the room, we desperately needed to finish out the closet. Also, we needed to hang the closet and room doors.
3) Furniture. Needed items: crib and changing table. Everything else would go in the closet on hanging shelves.
That’s it. Here’s what we did.
Paint
As you probably noticed from some of the out-of-sequence photos yesterday, we chose yellow. This was a difficult decision made after hours and hours of passionate discussion and debate.
No, not really.
We just wanted a gender neutral color and something that would offset the darkness and smallness of the room. Hey! Look! Yellow!
To be specific, we used Lantern Light from Sherman Williams, which is a nice, warm, soft yellow that is cheery as well as soothing. But it needed a little something.
How about some stripes? Just on one wall, the short wall, to help add some height.
We’d like to tell you that we are decorating geniuses that came up with the tone-on-tone wide stripe look, but in fact we lifted it wholesale from, we think, an IKEA catalog. Ah, well. You do what you gotta do.
We chose a brighter, sunnier yellow–the name of which escapes us, but it was also Sherman Williams and was something shockingly simple like “Sunny Yellow”–and got it in a satin paint instead of a flat so that the stripes would pop a little more. Then Michael measured out the stripes on the wall, trying to find a width that was chunky but still allowed a good number of stripes (they ended up being about 10 1/2″ wide) and got to work measuring, leveling, and taping.
Then painted every other one:
(Hi! Welcome to our website! Home of the lamest play-by-plays ever!)
Please note that though this paint is so non-toxic that you could probably gargle with it with no repercussions, Cherie is firmly maintaining her “I’m pregnant and therefore can’t paint” stance.
Now, after all the stripes are painted, you have one of two options. You can either take the Michael road and think that they look fantastic:
Or you can take the Cherie road and panic that you’ve just made your child’s room look like a circus tent. A really hideous circus tent.
It turns out that it looked a lot better after the blue tape came off. Hang on to the end of the post to see that.
Trim
We haven’t done any trim anywhere in the house, so with this room we actually had to create what we wanted our upstairs trim to look like. It was the experiment room. When you think about it, the nursery really is the perfect experiment room because last time we checked, babies had few opinions about trim. Just what we need: an easy audience.
We dug through our bookshelf of Arts and Crafts books to do a little research. Craftsman trim, like you would expect, is simple in design. There’s little carving of the wood and no fancy-pants cutouts. Instead, trim details are established by layering unadorned pieces of wood of different widths to create a simple, harmonious whole. There’s some nice photos of classic Craftsman trim here.
Ours ended up looking very similar in concept to the window trim on that site, with a few significant changes.
All along we’ve wanted the upstairs to feel a bit lighter and more modern than a standard Craftsman house and this trim is a good example of how we are doing that. Instead of heavy, square-cut pieces, we angled the top cap out, which looks a little less stodgy. Also, the thin piece (the “fillet” as they call it in the other site) is narrower and rounded instead of square. It just lightens the whole thing up.
(Helpful hint: paint your trim before putting it up or risk looking like the worst painter in the world to the whole internet.)
Here’s how it looks in context:
Please admire the wooden animal cutouts, which were made by Michael’s great-grandfather for Michael’s mom when she was a baby. They are just about the cutest things ever.
And here’s the trim on the door:
Don’t know why it’s blurry, so please don’t ask.
And, finally, we finished the closet. We had been ignoring it because, back during the great drywall-a-thon of this past spring, we ran out of drywall before getting this closet done. And there was no way we were buying more for a stinkin’ closet in a room we don’t even use. Forget it.
We weren’t particularly keen on revisiting the dreaded drywall now, either, which is why we were so grateful when we remembered that we had a stash of slightly damaged, white beadboard that we picked up for free somewhere along the way.
There is something charming about a beadboarded closet, isn’t there?
Something beyond the fact that we didn’t have to hang more drywall, that is.
Furniture
We already showed you the changing table in the last post (nothing worse than scooping yourself; we really should think these things through a little more), so let’s just tell you thast we painted it white as well and then we’ll move right along to the crib.
We didn’t make the crib. We admit it. We were lazy. We went to the store and bought a crib. Actually, that makes it sound like a pleasant experience so let’s rephrase. We went to multiple stores, looked at hundreds of truly hideous, bulky, badly designed cribs that were clearly made for the children of McMansion owners, swore repeatedly, went to more stores, gnashed our teeth, fretted about how we couldn’t find a simple, pretty, old-fashioned crib that wasn’t roughly the size of a tanker, nearly gave up, and then finally, right before Cherie lost her mind entirely and began prepping a bureau drawer for the kid to sleep in, found a crib that met our needs and was relatively inexpensive.
And it was back-ordered.
Whatever. We finally got it. Michael tackled the assembly in the living room and it actually went together the way it was supposed to. We weren’t missing pieces, all the screw holes lined up, and it was generally looking like a home run.
Then we carried it upstairs and discovered this:
It didn’t fit through the nursery doorway.
Now, you must understand, and this is shocking given how rarely Cherie is correct about anything having to do with this housebuilding thing, that she told him so. In fact, she strongly encouraged him to put it together upstairs just in case this very scenario occurred. This is not gloating. This is purely stating a fact.
Never mind. We just took it apart, moved it inside, and reassembled.
And then our nursery looked nice and pretty and just like we imagined it would:
For five minutes. Then this happened:
Coming up next, Part III: Excavating the Room One More Bloody Time.
