Project Nursery { Creating a Closet }

Our sweet Lilly's nursery was once an ugly storage room of sorts, her amazing Daddy built the room completely and when it came time to discuss layouts we knew we wanted some sort of closet but the only space left was a small barely three feet wide and a little more than twelve inches deep corner of the room - we knew we wouldn't be able to get a door on it but we had seen smaller closets work beautifully and figured we would give it a chance. I mean worst case scenario it could easily work as built in shelves.

I painted the inside of the closet white to contrast her little pink room and we liked that the white inside would let our baby girl's beautiful little dresses and bright colored blankets become the stars of the closet instead of competing. Once the paint had dried our attention turned to transforming this little nook into a closet, the possibility of just adding a few hanging rods was nixed immediately because we knew we wanted to get as much storage as we could. We considered a closet kit like this one but after installing a similar one years ago at our old home we remembered that it wasn't quite as simple and we didn't see the point of spending that much money on a kit that we would have to significantly cut up and alter just to fit the tiny closet space we had. But with a little bit of planning you can create a similar effect without the cost that is custom to your needs and space, it was pretty easy.

We picked up a 4ft wire shelf, less than $10 and used our little hack saw to cut it down
After debating between the two common systems, either the one with tracks drilled into the back of the closet or little brackets and hooks drilled into the walls but after looking at other closets (and the pantry..) in our house we decided to go with these side brackets and these drywall clips (but in a MUCH smaller box). Installation was so easy, we hammered in two little clips on the back wall then stuck the shelf into those clips and with the help of a level lined up those two side brackets. We also picked up this little guy for $5 to fill with little things like burp cloths, blankets and towels and I am still surprised by how much it can hold.

Our total cost for the closet was around $20 which is awesome compared to the closet kits ranging from $50-$150 (and more..) we also love that there is still a lot of room left if we choose to install another shelf or even a rod across the middle or add a shelf on the floor for shoe storage.

xo, Anne.

Project Nursery { gallery wall }

Work continues in our little girl's nursery, it has been so much fun to finally put together her room and I am so glad I waited. This week the gallery wall went up and I am so in love with it,

Even from the inspiration photos and early planning, I knew I wanted to add a gallery wall  to our sweet Lilly's nursery. I wanted a place for her newborn photos, maybe a maternity photo or two, keepsakes and even her own artwork and I knew I wanted to do it in a way that wasn't just same shape frames, I wanted variety and interest. So I came at this gallery wall with a fairly high wish list and wondered if I would be able to pull it off without overwhelming her room. 

With such a tall order and big expectations I took a few extra steps to ensure I ended up with a gallery wall that I was happy with.

STEP ONE

I browsed Pinterest looking at the gallery walls that I liked and had pinned before, What was it about those specific ones that caught my eye? I also put a lot of thought into what I wanted to include in the gallery wall, making a list helped me narrow down and decide on what would eventually fill the frames.

STEP TWO 

Collect the frames and other bits you want included in your gallery wall, I had been gathering frames for a few months and putting them aside.

STEP THREE

You can use anything that works, have some newspaper hanging around? That would do fine. I have a giant roll of freezer paper and decided to use that to trace and cut out mock versions of the things I wanted included in my gallery wall.

STEP FOUR

I know this all feels like unnecessary steps, why not just throw some frames on the wall and call it a day? While I am sure some can do that and pull it off, I knew that doing these extra steps would give me the opportunity to play with the arrangement before making a final decision. I did just that and as I taped my freezer-paper versions up on the wall I wound up playing with them and moving them about a fair amount before finally being happy with the way it looked. It is worth the extra effort (at least for me).

STEP FIVE

FINALLY, haha, grab some nails and your hammer! Some frames are easy to hang up while others have all these little hooks so if a frame is giving you trouble mark on your paper versions where the hooks are and hammer into that, it may seem strange but the paper version can be pulled away and now you won't be blindly trying to level out a frame with all those crazy hooks. 

Please ignore the empty frames throughout this post and while there was a sneak peak at the nursery I am saving the full reveal for another day as I work on sewing and adding some final details.

xo, Anne.

Project Nursery { accent wall }

From the beginning I knew I wanted an accent wall, although I briefly bounced between a few different ideas I constantly came back to horizontal stripes.

There are a few different ways people do striped walls, this is what I found worked best for me. But before any calculations or prepping, spend some time planning out what you really want. I had a lot of trouble settling on what colors would become the base color and the stripes; pink on pink, pink and white, pink and grey or somehow adding in that mint. If you're painting a new base you are supposed to allow at least 4 hours of dry time before prepping for stripes, I left mine overnight. I also had to decide how thick I wanted the stripes, a lot of big paint companies claim stripes look best between 4-12 inches, I settled with 7 inches after holding the measuring tape against the wall to get an idea of what it would look like. Did you know that horizontal stripes will make a room appear wider while vertical stripes will make ceilings seem higher than they are - all tricks of the eye.

You will need:

- Step ladder or stool (maybe that's just me?)

- Painters tape

- Measuring tape

- Construction level 

- Pencil

- Small roller (and/or) brush

- Paint!

STEP ONE: CALCULATE

Honestly, I'm not so good at math, so if this is feeling a little daunting to you don't worry - it isn't nearly as complicated as it seems. Start by measuring the height of the wall, if you're doing vertical stripes measure the length instead, I decided to round down to 91 inches after getting 91.4 since that .4 meant one stripe would be a tiny bit larger anyway. I grabbed my calculator (... ahem, my phone) and divided 91 by 7 and got 13. 

If you can't decide on the size of your stripes you can always reverse this calculation by dividing the number of stripes you want, if you use an odd number you will have the same color on top and bottom, choose a smaller number for fewer but larger stripes (try 5) or a bigger number for many thin stripes (try 17). 

As I mentioned before, I ended up with a small decimal (this can happen after you divide too), what will end up happening is one of your stripes will be less than an inch larger than the others. Before you start to have a confused meltdown because math is hard, I know I did right about here, just round down! You won't be able to tell the difference, especially once things like baseboards or crown molding come into play and your furniture moves in.

STEP TWO: DRAW IT BEFORE YOU TAPE IT

It may seem like an extra step, I know I felt that way and tried to go straight to taping, but it is totally worth the effort and it wont take nearly as long as you think. Starting from the bottom corner use the measuring tape to mark where your stripe will start, then line up the level (and make sure it is level) and draw away. 

STEP THREE: TAPE AWAY!

This isn't horribly complicated, just take your time and keep track of which color will go where, for the stripes made of your base coat tape inside your drawn lines and for your accent color line your tape up on the outside of those lines since you only need to paint your accent color now. 

It isn't necessary but I put little bits of tape onto the stripes that I wouldn't be painting, the size difference should be enough to tell which ones get the new paint and which ones will be the base coat, but I wanted to make sure if I wasn't thinking straight I still wouldn't accidentally paint an extra stripe pink.

STEP FOUR: NOW PAINT!

FINALLY! It's the moment we've all been waiting for, planning and day dreaming - it is finally time to paint those stripes! Grab your roller or brush and paint away, I work from the bottom up, from drawing those lines to pulling off the tape, so once that last stripe was painted I jumped off the ladder and went to my bottom corner. I ended up doing two coats, of course make your own judgement - can you get away with just one coat? do you need a third for perfect coverage? Just like before once I painted that last stripe on top I was off the ladder and at the bottom corner, which was starting to dry already, to move onto step five.

STEP FIVE: THE BIG REVEAL

To prevent paint from being taken off the wall (and subsequently wrecking your otherwise beautiful accent wall) I peel the tape off before everything is dry starting at the bottom. It is a little nerve wracking but you'll soon see that there is no ill effect as you pull the tape away and finally all that hard work reveals your perfectly straight stripes.

This whole process from start to finish took less than two hours, I could have probably been finished shortly after the hour mark but stopped to paint a final coat of pink on the other walls. 

I don't know what it is about paint but it absolutely transforms a room and now we're ready to start moving in our little Lilly's furniture!

xo, Anne

Project Nursery { Paint }

No posts last week and it's horrible! These last few weeks have felt like a long run of paint choices and painting and waiting for that horrible paint smell to disappear and then starting over again.

But all that to say we are done painting our sweet baby girl's nursery!

Let's start from the beginning, a couple months ago I brought home a stack of paint chips, my little pile of pink all seemed pretty close to each other. I spent a lot of time holding them up to the various walls in her room to get an idea of how the different lighting throughout the day would play into our final choice, slowly dwindling down our list. I knew I wanted something soft, something that would compliment the white furniture, something she can grow with. As the selection continued to drop I then compared the remaining pinks to the pink on the basket we bought for her room (the very first thing we bought for her nursery!) and Satin Sheets won.

Our chosen pink is from the Lowes Olympic line and I have always liked their no voc paint but at $30 a can, with how much primer and paint needed to go onto our new drywall we were looking at over $120 just on paint alone. Not to mention that the low and no voc is done to help the environment not to protect our bodies from the bad chemicals, I love the environment but if it wouldn't really protect us there wasn't a huge pull to go from low to no vocs. Especially when the switch to low voc cut the price nearly in half.

However to avoid color matching issues we still went with Lowes no voc paint in Satin Sheets, and planned to save on the not so specific ones (primer and white for example)

We tried out a recycled paint, Loop brand from Walmart, which boasts a low voc AND is friendly to the environment by keeping paint out of the landfills but after painting one coat I was sorely disappointed that the strong smell clung in the room and throughout our suite for days, actually it didn't go away until I painted over it and we ended up sleeping elsewhere because the odor was so strong. After that experience we ended up with another brand from Walmart called Home Trends which was still latex paint and claiming to be low voc we grabbed a pre-tinted can of white paint and went on our way. This was actually the same brand as the primer we used and it turned out well so I felt like I was taking a much smaller risk with this brand than the recycled one. Sure enough great coverage and although there was a slight odor having the window open and fan going quickly put and end to that.

Tomorrow I'll give a little sneak peak at our freshly painted nursery and how I did our accent wall without breaking my inner perfectionist :) 

xo, Anne

No Nursery Yet?

As project nursery commences both in real life and on the blog some may wonder why we are just starting now, I mean our daughter is four months old after all and considering it is common practice for moms to prepare the nursery while pregnant (most starting shortly after the big 20 week ultrasound), by those standards I'm getting at this pretty late in the game. Although it is far from unheard of, there is a much smaller group of parents that forgo the nursery preparations until after the baby is born - similarly to those who skip the baby shower for a meet & greet upon baby's arrival.

When I was pregnant with Lilly I would get excited to buy things, to get ready for her but then the "what if" reel would play on in my mind. It was so bad that almost every time we would buy something I was terrified that we'd loose her. Even if I heard her heartbeat that morning, saw her on ultrasound the day before or felt her kicking right there. I was so scared, as if buying an outfit would somehow decide whether or not my body could carry this pregnancy. It made no sense but I could only see preparing the nursery as a bad experience while pregnant and I deserved to enjoy my pregnancy - and every bit of it that I could.

I know that my anxiety with her nursery (among other things) stemmed from our history, once you've lost a child things change. We lost our son at forty weeks pregnant, the day after his due date, his nursery was done when we left to go to the hospital that morning. But instead of the happy homecoming I envisioned, his bright blue room sat empty, dark and silent for months until we packed everything away. I know there are angel moms who yearn for that, just to have something tangible that proves their baby was here, I don't regret that (this is quickly turning into a whole other post) but for the sake of my sanity I was glad to hold off on the nursery.

Also between our renovations and being on some level of bed rest my entire pregnancy, it kind of forced me to stay out of the nursery and I love that I am now able to enjoy it, I am able to participate in preparing her nursery and I have already tweaked our nursery plans to include things that make her happy - which I would be reluctant to do, the way that I'm doing it, if we had already finished her nursery.

I can't wait to start painting, sewing and get this little lady's room done!

xo, Anne

Project Nursery { planning }

With how well our sweet Lilly is growing, it is very clear that the days of her sleeping in her bassinet are numbered and she will need to be transferred into her crib very soon. With that quickly approaching we're officially kicking off project nursery!

While we were trying to conceive and throughout our pregnancy I had a lot of time to day dream of our someday nursery and while there are a lot of things that stuck, there are a lot of things that have changed too. Especially with Lilly here, I've started to include things that she likes and I LOVE that because even though she's so young she has a say in her room! 

Here are the rough plans and ideas for our baby Lilly's nursery.

 All of our nursery furniture is white, which I love, and I think that our all white furniture will make a great base to add pops of soft pink and minty-teal through accessories, paint and what feels like a million sewing/DIY projects that I am hoping to pull off.

While the color combination is far from unique I am looking forward to finding ways to customize her room and like that you can't just go to the store and get the exact same nursery set (though there is nothing wrong with that, just isn't my thing)

I would like to include:

- an accent wall, more than likely with pink stripes, behind the crib.

- create extra seating that doubles as toy storage. 

- a gallery wall featuring things like; maternity photos, a shadow box, her little prints, newborn photos, ultrasounds, meaningful quotes, a pretty mirror ect. (but some of these things may find their place elsewhere)

- a TON of storage by using the bench/bookshelves for her toys and books, having a change table with shelves for storing bath/diaper changing supplies and maximizing both the closet space and the space under the crib for additional storage of clothing/diapers/ect.

I seriously can't wait to start putting things together and see our baby girl's nursery go from ideas and day dreams to ready for her to move into. 

xo, Anne.