Nursery: Complete!

I know this was a lot later than we originally anticipated but...the nursery is finally done so get ready for a photo dump of all the things we did. Hopefully if we attempt to do this sort of makeover to the rest of the house, this will help us remember all the different things we tried - and how much work it really was. (Seriously. So. Much. Work.) If you know us in person and would rather wait to see it in person (ahem Caitlin or others), feel free to skip this post and just come visit! 

We started renovations on the room on January 14th, and I would say David put the finishing touches on just a couple weeks ago, so it took us a solid 4 months. For such a small room, it was a lot longer than we anticipated.

Here's the best picture I could find of what the room looked like before:

It was originally my office, with a desk on one side and bookshelves on the other. That wasn't going to work with a new baby on the way, so my office got booted to the attic and we started renovations (with all those tools pictured above).

We have a smattering from the renovation process:

too dusty for a pregnant lady

Because the walls were plaster & lathe, and cracking majorly, we decided to gut the room since it wouldn't make sense to paint walls that would just need to be replaced in a few years anyway. So the plaster & lathe had to go, and then we installed more outlets, a light in the closet (pictured above), insulation, and drywalled the whole room.

halfway through - mostly drywalled at this stage

I didn't take a ton of pictures in this middle stage, because it looked the same for a long time. Trust me when I say, however, that we did a lot of little things that I'd never thought about before. Want to install a ceiling fan? Have to make sure your support beams are strong enough. Working with an old house? You'll probably have to remove approximately 8,000 nails in the wall studs, just so you can nail into them again with the new drywall. Buy new custom windows, because your windows aren't normal sizes? Good luck making head or tails of the instructions that come with them.

After tons of hours, lots of watching of YouTube videos, exhausting late nights, and a good supply of ice cream to keep us going, the room's finally done. Now to the fun pictures!

from the doorway

east wall

south wall & window

west wall (adjacent to bathroom)

Looks pretty all put together, doesn't it? I am really proud of how much work we put into it, and how dedicated David was throughout the whole project to getting it done and doing things right. Obviously he did approximately 200% more of the actual labor than I did, so the credit should go to him. I did more of the crafty things - sewed the curtains, the baby quilt, and the embroideries on the wall, as well as got put in charge (by default) of organizing everything once it was complete.

Some details:

custom baby-changing station

some embroideries I did & then framed

still mostly-empty closet ready to be filled with cute clothes!

So there you have it!

The doors still need to be finished. We took off the two doors to the room, planning on stripping them and re-painting them to match the new white that was in the room. There were approximately 8 different layers of paint on each door (again, yay for old houses) so the process is taking a lot longer than we anticipated. Eventually we'll get them up and installed but the room works just fine without them, right? :)

Also, just in case you'd like to see it as well, we got a little bassinet from David's grandma and put it up in our room for the little one's first couple weeks.

including the bear I bought for him/her - cute right??

It feels really good to be done with the thing. I like to just go in and rock in my rocking chair and give the baby pep talks about getting here early....which have so far been unsuccessful but still fun to do. :) I'm sure you'll be seeing lots more pics of the room once the baby is here to take pictures of!
HG