The Baby’s Room…complete
It’s been a while since I last updated the blog. For those who follow, I bet you are wondering if the baby is here yet, and that’s why I’ve been slacking. Well the answer is no, but we have been busy getting things ready, trying to prepare as best we can. Some of you have seen the room, and others have not…and to those who have seen it in person, well, we changed it around. I figured it was time to send a few updates before he arrives, so here you go.
We had these decals that came with the bedding, so we decided to frame a few, like Mr. Elephant and Mr. Whale. As for that blank gap in the middle, we have some ideas for that, but you’ll just have to wait and see I suppose. As for the white blanket draped over the crib, that was a gift from my mom. That was the same blanket my parents brought me home in, and my mom saved it all these years. Can we say “wow!”
Here is a better shot from the door when you enter the room. I added a shelf above the window, that also acts as a curtain rod. We put some nick-knacks up there, including a cute stuffed bunny. The rocking chair was MC’s parents, and we really didn’t want a glider, so this worked perfectly. The yellow quilt was hand-made by a dear friend of ours, and it is super-duper sweet. We bought a dresser from ikea and put a changing pad on top of that, which so far looks like it will be perfect. We found this brown polka-dot fabric and decided to use that instead of a closet door, mainly because the room’s door and the closet doors couldn’t be open at the same time. Serious design flaw, but remedied with a cloth door.
We got a small cubbie system from target, along with some cute multi-colored baskets for all his toys and whatnot. I personally love the frog. Can you see a theme here, lots of cute animals everywhere. Speaking of which, the two shadow boxes were sort of an after thought. The tiny one has a little hedgehog in it, which MC gave to me when I was in the hospital a few years back. It just looked so cute, we had to use it.
And of course, this decal we just too perfect. He’s adorable! Man, I hope this kid loves animals, because they are EVERYWHERE in his room. So now we wait until he comes along, which should be any day now. Hopefully I’ll update this once he arrives, with gobs and gobs of photos. It all depends on how busy we get. Until then, the waiting game continues.
Just a trim
With the chair rail all cut, primed and painted, it was time to see if all that precise cutting would fit together on the walls. Still, before we began nailing the rail to the wall, we had one last step of prep work to go, marking the studs. I wanted to make sure that all the rail was attached securely to the wall, and directly into the studs. I took my stud finder along each wall, and when it beeped, we put a piece of painters tape up so we could easily identify each stud as we used the nail gun.
This helped so much. We didn’t have any extra marks on the wall, and I knew each time I was hitting a stud and not just plain drywall. With the walls marked, we begin nailing the chair rail to the wall by using a nail gun, with 1 1/4″ nails. After a few shots, the room started to take shape…and about 20 minutes later, we were all done.
We still have to caulk all the chair rail, but that’s all in due time. I was anxious to just get this all done, and MC really wanted to get the giant crib box out of our living room and into the baby’s room. So once the chair rail was up, we put together the crib.
You can ignore the gold lamp, that won’t be staying in the room, it’s just there for now because that’s the only light in the room. Same goes with the random can of paint, that will be used for touch us on the chair rail once I finish caulking all the nail holes.
Next to do in the room is to replace all the outlets, put up the curtain and shade for the window and then get some furniture. It’s still a work in progress, but boy has it come a long way. It looks like an actual room now. WOO!
Just a quick reminder, here’s what it looked like before:
and AFTER:
All Aboard the Chair Rail
This weekend, MC and I went over to Home Depot to begin phase two of the baby’s room, installing chair rail. Now, I added all the baseboard and toe kicks to the living/dining room, so I had a pretty good idea that I would make mistakes when doing the miter cuts, but Chair rail was a bit more difficult for some reason. I made all my measurements, picked up about 50 feet (4 x 13′ pieces) of primed pine chair rail and began cutting. I quickly realized that I had made a few bad cuts, and before I knew it, I was left only with scrap, which meant another trip to the Depot. My wife loves it when we have to make multiple trips to the hardware store (*sarcasm).
Once we returned from the store, I made the final cuts and dry fit all of it together. Now all that’s left to is sand a few of them down, paint and tack them up. For now, they’ll sit in the room on my sawhorses ready for phase three.
Painting the nursery
Well, we’re excited to finally be painting the third bedroom in our house, and we’re even more excited as to why. It’s time to get the room ready for a new member of our family, because we’re having a baby (insert confetti here). So to prepare for our new house guest, we got painting. Last week we got rid of that awesome blue trim around the room, and even though we know we’re having a boy, that blue trim was ugly. Very very Ugly.
So now we have a fresh all white room, it’s like the white room challenge on HGTV, except I don’t have silly restrictions and objects to use. We debated a lot about what we wanted to do, but in the end, we decided to split the room in paint colors, and add some chair rail to separate it. The first step was decided the height and location of the chair rail. We decided to have the top of the chair rail sit at 36″ from the floor. I measured the center of one wall, made a mark and used my level across the room to get a nice straight line. Then, I just had to tape it off.
One bit of advice I read online was not to constantly measure from the floor, as the floor may not be level and can cause your line to become askew. They were right, because as I measured along, the height would change a bit, but I double checked my level and the line along the wall was 100% level. Weird.
Once the tape was up, I taped off the rest of the room as to make sure I didn’t get any paint on that nice new white trim. Then we started with the top coat in case there were any drips onto the bottom that we could just paint over later.
Its funny, because the color is more blue in person, it looks green when it’s photographed. I forget the name of the actual colors we used, but I’ll find out and put them up here soon. Once the top coat was done, we pulled off the tape so the paint didn’t dry and peel later. I’ve had that happen the last few times, and since it was a hot day, I was worried our perfect line would get ruined. We just wanted a nice straight top line, since the chair rail will hide the imperfect bottom line. With the tape pulled, it was time to get the bottom coat on, a much lighter blue.
So now the room has a fresh new coat of paint, and we love it. I’ll also note that we used the HGTV paint from Sherwin Williams because it is low VOC, but to be honest, it smelled more than their regular paint does, which I thought was odd. It covered pretty well, we only needed one gallon of each paint. Next to do in the room is to paint and put up the chair rail, replace the outlets with tamper resistant ones, and then get all the baby’s furniture in. Exciting!
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So long blue trim
There are only a few rooms left in the house that have remained untouched. One of them finally got a fresh coat of paint to give it the “start anew” treatment. As you can tell, the blue trim was a bit too much for the room, and not something that we enjoyed, at all.
I was a bit worried that painting the trim would in turn mean that I would end up painting the carpet, but thanks to this bit of advice I read over at Bower Power, it wasn’t as hard as I thought. She suggested that you use a compound knife and wedge it under the trim as to protect the carpet. Great idea! One of her commenters even suggested wrapping the end of the knife in painters tape for an easier clean up, and so that’s what I did.
I will say though, that a little paint did get on the carpet at certain points, and it was probably user error or the type of carpet we have that kept leaping into the wet paint. All in all though, it worked great, it only took 3 coats of behr’s “polar bear” paint and primer in one to cover it. And by only, I mean holy crap, three coats of hand cramping and awkward positions on the floor. In the end though, it looks so much better to just have everything back to white.
I also filled in the holes on the wall with drywall compound, so that I could get started on painting the ceiling soon. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish that up this weekend, and maybe even the first coat on the walls. So what will it look like? You’ll just have to wait and see.
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About Matt and MC
We just recently bought our first home, and we decided to share our story of our adventures with you. The ups and downs of home ownership, and all the fun we'll have in between. Ignore the typos and just have fun, that's what we're here for. 
