Nursery Source List

Our nursery has been featured at Baby Lifestyles! Go here to see the full article, and be sure to check out their site if you are looking for nursery design inspiration.

In the interview, they had asked for sources on where we got our nursery decor items, so I thought I would list them here in case you are curious too.

You can find more pictures of our nursery here, here, and here.

Wall color: Silver Strand by Sherwin Williams

Trim color: Roman Column by Sherwin Williams

Crib: Jenny Lind from here

Dresser: Home Again (Salt Lake City)

Frames above dresser: Ikea

Artwork: Original watercolors

Bookshelf: Campo (sadly, no longer in business)

Mirror: Pier One

Rocker/Glider: Pottery Barn

Bedding/Pillows: Made by me with fabric from here.

Bird art above crib: I made the birds with leftover bedding fabric with this pattern. Branch from our backyard.

Lamp: Home Goods. It was originally dark gray, and we spray painted it a glossy white.

Night stand: Antique handed down from my Grandma (H's namesake) and painted by me.

Chandelier: Ballard Designs

I Got It Covered

When I was little, my mother tried to give me sewing lessons. I scoffed at her, oh yes, I did scoff at her. I was more interested in hiding in my little room in the attic, cutting out pictures from Architectural Digest to create my dream house from bits and pieces of the glossy magazine. Sewing was for boring people.

Fast forward twenty + years and look at me now! I sew. Or I try to sew. In fact, almost every time I start a project I end up calling my mom to ask three hundred questions. "How do you thread this thing?" "Why is my bottom thread going all wonky?" "Was I a mistake?" (Oh wait, that's for another post.) My mother is too nice to do it to my face, but I'm sure she's the one laughing now. Boring people indeed.

It only took me six months (or is it eight? who's counting?), but I finally finished my very first quilt. Alright, if you must know, I got my mom to help me with the actual quilting part (thanks Mom), but the rest of it I did myself. Honest.

When I bought all the material to make H's bedding and pillows for her room I never intended to make a quilt. But then the fabric store got the better of me and I came home with way more material than I would ever need (big surprise). So a quilt was born. Not actually born (thank goodness, I still haven't recovered from H's traumatic delivery) but stitched together with love. Um, no, that's blood. Sometimes the needle and I don't see eye to eye. I didn't mean that as a pun. We really don't get along.

A closeup of the birdies in the top left hand corner. 

I love rick rack. Especially when it is really BIG rick rack.

 Everything good in life should be extra large.

The back side is almost as cute as the front.

I love how the new quilt coordinates with the birdies who live above the crib...

and the bedding that I made.

Now H will have something to remind her of me in the terrible event that I die before she is grown-that's irrational fear #34. I won't tell you how long the list is.

Chasing Butterflies

I spend a lot of time in the nursery. Between nursing, changing, and rocking this is the most used room in the house these days. In fact, there are usually extraneous assorted chairs in here as well, because when we have visitors they end up here too. They come in to chat while I nurse and then we linger for a while because it's just a lovely space to be in. But truth be told, I have redecorated the room more than once in my fickle head. So the other day as Mr. was working on the kitchen cabinets I decided to spiff up the wall behind the door. It just looked sad...

Sad and empty. 

The other day, when we were outside, H spotted a butterfly flitting by us and it made her laugh out loud. The best sound in the whole world. So I rummaged through my insane mountain of scrapbook paper (side note: I buy scrapbook paper like it's my mission in life, but I don't scrapbook. Nope, not even a little. It's just a little obsessive behavior that I can't seem to kick! Seriously. Anyone else have this problem?) and cut out some cute little butterflies. 

I am hoping these paper butterflies inspire many more laughs from my happy almost six month old. I love how they look like they come in through the door and then exit toward the ceiling!

They really bring together the color palette in the room!

Behind the Scenes: Nursery Renovation

I always love a good after, the final reveal, the finished product. But I also love to see the work that went into making a space beautiful. I think it helps for future projects as well, because once you've seen the steps that it takes and then see it all come together, you can then look at a "before" space and instantly know how to transform it. So if you're weird like me and are interested in the behind-the-scenes footage, then this is for you. 

If you have been reading for a while, you will be well acquainted with how our cottage appeared when we first purchased it three and a half years ago. Teal and pink pretty much sums it up, and not in a good way. You also know that we had some serious space problems. Both bedrooms came with one tiny closet each, which meant that my clothes were stuffed into the closet in the master bedroom and Mr.'s clothes were stuffed into the closet in the guest bedroom (very inconvenient). So we started Project Pepto to create space where we really needed it most. After all there is no such thing as too many closets. 

This sketch shows the layout of part of our cottage before renovations began. 

This next sketch shows the changes that we have made to the floorplan. To see the dining room renovation go here and for the master bedroom closet renovation go here.  For this last phase of the project we closed off the old closet from the master bedroom side and opened up the space on the other side of the guest bedroom (which is now the nursery) to create a larger closet which is way more usable.

This shows what the room looked like when we bought the house. Yep, teal. From top to bottom. 

This picture shows the tiny size of the closet before. It was three feet wide.

 Here is the guest bedroom after we knocked down the wall between the two closets and created a larger opening for the new closet.

This is what the floors looked like after we took the walls down. We ended up replacing the entire floor so we didn't have to worry about patching the old hardwoods.

The closet after the opening had been patched and primed by Mr. New floors are finished.

Closet shelving going in.

The closet shelving is finished and Mr. works on trim and molding.

Molding is finished and paint goes on.

New lighting is installed.

New doors finally go in. I initially thought that I would put curtains behind the glass doors, and that is my back-up plan for when H turns out to be messy and not keep her closet OCD clean like her mother!

This shows our master bedroom closet doors that we installed when we finished that phase of the project. We decided to match the doors in the nursery to lend some continuity to this crazy cottage. It may seem like an odd choice to put glass doors on a closet, but I love it. It makes the rooms seem larger, more open. 

These knobs were original to our 1940s cottage. The backplates on the master closet doors were also original to the cottage and were spray painted to match the hinges. When it came time to finish the nursery, we wanted them to be similar but we didn't have any more backplates that had been salvaged. What to do? Our favorite architectural salvage yard saved the day (I'll have to do a post on that place someday, it's amazing). They had the exact same ones that had been original to our cottage, so those got a coat of spray paint as well and installed on the nursery closet doors along with two more knobs salvaged from the cottage. 

So there you have it - a condensed version of the whole renovation process on the nursery. In case you missed the reveal you can find it here. 

Nursery Reveal

Wow! Time flies when you have an infant! Our little one is already four weeks old and she completely rules the roost. Between staring for long periods of time at her adorable long eye lashes, to whiling away the evening hours rocking an inconsolable baby with reflux, it is hard to get anything else done around here. But alas, the reason I am here today: the nursery!

The whole concept of the nursery started with these watercolors. When I was eleven I wrote a short story about a tree. A few years ago my mom and I thought it would be great to turn that story into a children's book and she graciously offered to illustrate it for me. I knew the second that I found out I was pregnant that these pictures would be in the nursery no matter what gender our little blueberry turned out to be. I picked my favorite nine pictures and wrote the story on the matting inside the frame. Mr. loves to read the story to little H when he changes her (that's his unofficial job - and he is great at it!)

The rest of the nursery evolved from the watercolors. I found this idea for a bird mobile and turned it into a stationary piece of art for the wall instead of a mobile over the crib.

I found the chandelier at Ballard Designs, and it is definitely my favorite item in the room. Mr. installed a dimmer switch so that we could turn the lights way down at night to prevent waking little H during changing time. 

I bought this reclaimed teak bookshelf years ago from my favorite furniture store that is sadly no longer in business (Campo). H's uncle brought the dolls back from several business trips to Japan, the old doll was mine when I was little and was given to me by my grandmother (H's namesake), and the little pink elephant was made by me - my first foray into making stuffed animals. Not easy!

This closet wraps up the final stage of project pepto. More on that later. 

This was a dress that H's namesake made for me when I was little.

Perhaps I should take off the chair slipcover and steam it? Meh. Who has time for such things?

You might remember this piece from when I painted it? We thought it would be nice for little H to have something of her namesake's in her room (she was named after my grandmother, did I already mention that?)

I hope you have a lovely weekend! Stay tuned for behind-the-scenes shots of the nursery renovation...