Thursday, July 16, 2015

Baby Prep: Nursery Progress as of 23 Weeks

It seems like it's a good time to start working on this whole nursery thing now that I'm over halfway through this pregnancy. 

If you remember a post back in May, we'd left the nursery looking like this: 

Yikes. Things all over the place. White walls. The trim strewn here and there. 

Well, the visits from both sets of future grandparents proved fruitful when it came to making progress on this space. First, my mom helped me paint the walls a grey that can look either lavender or blue, depending on the light and the items surrounding it. Then, my father and Levi put together our dresser. Levi also got a lot more trim pulled off and stripped. When Levi's parents came to visit, his mom and I picked out some curtains that made the first, big difference in the room. 

The rest of the post is quite picture-heavy, so I won't bore you with more text! 

First of all, as soon as you walk in the door, this is what you see.

As you can see, it's not quite up to health and safety standards. There will be a crib surrounding that mattress someday, as well as a mobile hanging above it. My matchy-matchy self would prefer a Boppy cover that wasn't that particular print, so that will probably change too. 

Don't you love that pink color where the trim was ripped off? Yeah, me neither. My paint color basically doesn't photograph, so I won't even try to give you a close-up of it. 

If we look more closely at the crib corner, we find a pretty steep ceiling slope. 

Also, we really enjoy the transition from original plaster walls to the drywall addition done decades later. There's this pretty interesting bubbled seam running around the entire room. But at least it added some much-needed space to this room. The future mobile will pretty much hang directly from the ceiling. No need for a long string in this room!

Moving back to the other corner, you can see a rather interesting set-up. Those built-in shelves are in a rather awkward spot, and this is pretty much the only place for the rocker if we also want a dresser in the room (which we do, obviously). My biggest need for this corner of the room is some form of light. With the only light in the room coming from the opposite corner and the extreme slope of the ceiling, this part of the room is in perpetual shadow. 

This little basket makes my heart happy. One thing we already have plenty of (and plan to acquire more of) are stuffed animals. Levi and I both spent hours playing with our collections, and what you're looking at here are the remnants of our childhood. 

The built-in shelves. It's hard to see just how ugly they are when they're stuck behind a glider, and I'm perfectly content to keep it that way. My plan is to put baskets and bins on the shelves to corral and contain various toys. One of the shelves will also serve as my breastfeeding station as well. 

On to the closet of doom. 

Ok, so I guess it's not actually that bad. It looks pretty rough with the trim removed from the doorway, but it's going to look SO GOOD when it's back. As you can see, the closet currently houses some winter maternity wear, a hand-me-down carseat (for a second vehicle only), bins of my old clothes and hand-me-down baby clothes, and a few brand new pieces for Lil' Feisty. 

Those baby clothes may look boring, but one handy thing about not revealing gender is that all of our current clothes are in my favorite (boring) colors! Grey, white, and navy sure are timeless and classy. And they happen to match . . .

Those drapes. WOW, those drapes. I had my eye on them for awhile, but only after taking them out of the package did my mother-in-law and I realize just how thick and luxurious they were. As you can tell from the glare in my poorly-edited photo, they are a deep navy color, which is just what I needed to bring out some of the blue on the walls. The glider corner will bring out the lavender. 

It's pretty hard to photograph this part of the room. This is where all the light comes from, the curtains are light-blocking, and I don't have any tie-backs for them. Also, the lights on the wall create a glare no matter how I try to take the picture. See?

This is our dresser. It's not the original one I wanted from IKEA, but after double-checking some measurements I realized that the first one I wanted wasn't big enough to hold a changing pad on the top. Whoops! So we went with this one, which only came in white. There just wasn't space on this wall for a double-wide dresser. 

As you can see, I've already received some newborn diapers, which is GREAT. They won't actually be stored this way, but this is what I had on hand. My plan is to add some sort of wall storage for diapering supplies since the dresser is pretty much only big enough for a changing pad and nothing else. 

And inside the dresser as of right now? 

One thing we have up to our ears are baby blankets. This is mostly because both grandmothers have gifted us with hand-me-down and new blankets already, and we've had a few as gifts from other relatives too. I'll need a better way to store them soon!

Our middle drawer. A cute bath set from a relative and the bag storing all the packing material for those drapes. I kept it all just in case I wanted to return them. I do not want to return them. 

This drawer still has the assembly instructions for the dresser, and it has become the catch-all for the huge number of coupons and samples you get when you start buying things in the baby product world. Seriously, I'm not a coupon person, so I've never dealt with this many coupons before and actually wanted to use most of them. Yikes!

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So that's where the nursery is right now. It's made a ton of progress, but it still has a lot more to go. As a brief reminder, here's what my vision was and remains: 

We're getting there! 

Keep it real, y'all!

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