Thanks Stone for keeping on top of us about the nursery. I've been meaning to post pictures for ages, but more and more keeps getting accomplished in the room on almost a daily basis, so I keep putting off taking a picture. Plus, when there's more that gets accomplished, theres usually more of a mess of tools, paint cans, etc.
As with every other room, I can't publish pictures of the nearly finished room without publishing pictures of where it started. For some reason, I don't have a lot of pictures of this room. I think because it was SO disgusting, I probably never really felt the need to take pictures of it to show it off. So, you won't see pictures of the horrible shag carpet, or nasty buckets of water that were permanently stationed in the corner of the room to catch the rainwater, or a really good picture of the flaky painted woodwork that would have made any lead abatement inspector shiver. But I'm sure you all can get a pretty good idea of what we started with.
This is a shot of the closet. The closets in the babies room and Jayden's room are really great closets, but they started out completely disgusting. The roof leaked above both, causing huge holes in the ceiling and the plaster to turn to dust at the touch. The built in drawers were thankfully empty, but they had been duct taped shut to keep out the draft. I still can't get the duct tape residue off because it was so old, so if anyone has any suggestions besides completely sanding them down and varnishing them, let me know.
The best aspect of this room is the three windows that face the street. Jayden loves watching out of them for daddy to get home, and I'm sure the new baby will love them just as much. As you can see, the windows themselves were rotted. The woodwork was a flaky mess with tons of staples, nails, plastic, and window treatment hardware all over the place. Nasty.
This is a view of the other window in the room. Obviously after we had done some work on the place. I'm pretty sure this picture was just taken in the last couple of months, considering the room is empty. It was our storage room for the first year or so of us living in the house.
This is the opposite wall with the closet door. We had taken out the wall sconces, and still had to patch the holes along with all of the other cracks all over the room.
You can't really see all of the nails, but I took this picture to signify the hundreds of nails we had to pull up from the floor that were left from the many layers of flooring we took up.
Yay! Paint! I like vibrate colors for children's rooms. It gives little babies something to look at. This color is much more pleasing in person. This picture is the day that I started on the floor. For Jayden's room I painted the pine floor, and we love it. It's cheap, durable, and it works great with train sets.
It was pretty beat up and messy, I bleached it twice before painting. Then I primered twice, and painted twice.
And Jayden helped the entire time. He has been such a great help with the babies room.
And the room today. To us, is practically finished. To other people, maybe not. Everything is painted except the woodwork around the single window and the doors. We still need the light fixture... and the furniture. Heather was nice enough to give us a rocking chair that looks perfect in the room. Besides stripping paint, plastering, sanding, and painting my mom's contribution was the window treatments for the room (with four fairly large windows, Josh and I wouldn't have been able to afford anything nearly as nice). Joe and Barb have ordered the crib. And we'll fill in the rest of the gaps when we find out if it's a boy or girl (choosing a gender neutral color is about as far as I'll go) and when we get our tax return.
You can't get a good picture of these windows because of the lighting, but I'm sure you can tell they look lots better.
Like I said, I had a hard time cleaning up the dresser. But it still looks lots better. And it's clean.
The rocking chair. As you can see, this window still needs a bit of work. But we're almost there!
This is the crib, isn't it pretty? I like straight lines and darker woods, so it's pretty perfect.
This is the changing table we're hoping to get. It's made by the same manufacturer and it's the same finish, so hopefully it will look good. As far as changing tables go, this one looks like it could function as a regular piece of furniture someday.
That's all for the nursery. I'll do a follow up pregnancy post shortly, I have to make myself presentable first so I can show off my ginourmousness.
