Baby Dresser/Changing Table Transformation!

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The room we’re using as a nursery is our smallest bedroom. It has the best arrangement of doors and windows for a crib, dresser, and glider. We figure when the baby gets older and ready for a big boy/girl room, we’ll move the child to a different bedroom to continue using this one as a nursery.

In adjusting to the small space, we really needed to have some multi-tasking furniture. So… we decided to find a dresser that could double as a changing table. From talking to friends and family with babies, it seems that the changing table gets the most use during the late night changes and is less of a benefit during the day when the couch/bed/floor is closer and easier to use for diaper changes. Why invest in a piece of furniture for such a singular use? Didn’t make sense for us.

So… off to Craigslist! I found this “beauty” about 20 miles away for $75. Here’s the original Craigslist picture.

We were thrilled to get there and see that this thing was solid wood with beautiful dove-tailed drawers. Perfect! And $75? Yes!!

It sat in the garage for a while (okay, for months) before I started working on it. First step… remove the old, dated hardware and fill the holes. This took a few coats and a lot of sanding.

When it was all set, I began priming. Our favorite primer is Zinssers Cover Stain – no sanding required! It sticks like glue to any surface and levels out beautifully so you get a smooth finish everytime.

Again, I wore my fancy mask for this project since I was preggo (about 30 weeks at this point).

(In that picture I’m actually painting a side table… more about that table later).

One coat of primer done! Check out that mirror, too. That might be my favorite part. It’s easily 3’x4’ – worth the $75 cost on its own. So beautiful! It attaches to the back on those brackets you can just barely see sticking up from the back of the dresser. 

Soooo many coats of paint. When I was done with the white paint (we used Behr Ultra paint in a flat finish – I had the paint tinted a soft white color), we applied a layer of Polycrylic. I did a bunch of research on the right sealer to use and decided on this product. Polycrylic is a water-based clearcoat (Polyurethane is oil-based) and a little less durable than its oil-based cousin. However, the Polycrylic product is supposed to cover better over white and yellow less. Over time Polyurethane will yellow on white paint and I really wanted to avoid this. I applied it with a small foam roller but after each drawer/dresser side was covered I used a fine paintbrush to run over the top coat and smooth out any bubbles.

I also ordered some cute orange ceramic knobs online to replace the old, dated hardware that came with the dresser. Here it is in the nursery!

And a close up so you can see the adorable shiny knobs. :)

Baby Shower ~ October 24

One of the sweetest things about sharing with my girlfriends that I was pregnant was sharing in their joy for me. Immediately after they were done shrieking with joy, they began offering to throw me a shower later in my pregnancy. It warmed my heart so much when they actually began planning one! Many of my friends joined together to throw my first shower, held on a Sunday afternoon in October.

I helped select the design for the invitation (done by my friend Sarah) and the girls carried the “B is for Baby” theme throughout the shower with the food (“C is for Cupcakes” etc.) and all the decor. It was an adorable theme and they executed it so well! (This invitation will be similar to the baby announcement we use when the kiddo gets here!)

My sweet hostesses were…    

Kindra Adams – When we moved to Nashville in 2004 Bronce and I met Kindra and her husband, Jason… they were our neighbors 3 doors down! We became fast friends and have been able to keep in close contact since we moved back to Knoxville in 2008. (picture below)

Catherine Bobo – my mom’s best friend and the mom of my oldest and dearest friend, Robin. Catherine lives in Pennsylvania and was unable to be at the shower, but she loved me well from a distance.

Katie Boerema – a long-time friend from college and career (we were both pharma reps for Merck for many, many years together). We’ve stayed close even though we haven’t lived in the same town since 2003! She also offered to carry my camera all afternoon so I’d end up with some pictures – something she wasn’t super comfortable with but she did a fabulous job!! (picture of us together below)

Jane Hanson – my mom :) Since the hostesses were all from outside Knoxville, mom graciously stepped in to be the local coordinator. She did a lot of the groundwork and helped make the day incredibly special. (picture below, with Dad and Bronce)

Sarah Pattison – She and her husband have become great friends of ours – we were in a couples small group together for years and our husbands are in a men’s small group together now. She offered her skills at graphic design (seriously… she’s amazing… check her business The Happy Envelope) to custom design an invitation for the shower.

Robin Redding – I’ve known her since I was a toddler, we grew up on the same street, our moms are best friends… she’s the dearest friend I have and I was so touched that she offered to help with the shower even though she lives 8 hours away and would be unable to join us!

The shower was held in the outside courtyard at Fellowship Church on a beautiful warm Sunday afternoon. The girls did an amazing job making the tables personalized and dressing up the food and gifts areas.

They had this awesome vase filled with white branches set up with a station for people to write down their blessings for me and the baby on little paper nests to be hung from the branches. Going through those notes later was the sweetest thing and I’ll treasure them in the baby’s scrapbook.

 

Lots of sweet friends came out to share the afternoon. Jennifer is due to deliver a little boy, Luke, the day before my due date.

A group of friends came out from Fulton – Kathy, Olivia, Ashley, and Amber. It was fun to see them outside of work and I was touched by how far some of them traveled to come!

Katie (due just a few weeks after me!), Sarah, Jennifer, and Mom. Notice that in the center of each table you can see mementos from Bronce and my baby years. Pictures, outfits, stuffed animals, etc. – all of these things were scattered around for everyone to enjoy.

Mom’s good friend Cheryl (who made the baby a beautiful white afghan), Bronce’s grandmother “Mamaw,” Mom, and Kindra:

Lauren, Melissa, and sweet little Nonavea…

 

Dad designed this beautiful cupcake display after one I saw online. He did a beautiful job!

Robin really wanted to come to the shower (I insisted she wait to make the long journey once the baby is actually here!) so in her absence she sent this amazing diaper cake. Usually these are made with regular disposable diapers but since I’m doing cloth she made it out of burp cloths (which she personalized with beautiful fabrics and ribbons), washcloths, and bibs. This is one of the best gifts I’ve received in terms of practicality! It was beautiful and I hated to take it apart!

 

Mom signed (well, stitched) this cross-stitch when she made it back in 1980 – the year I was born! It hung in my nursery when I was a baby. A few weeks after the shower she and I had it re-matted and framed and it will hang in my baby’s nursery, too. It’s still so beautiful!

And of course, every shower involves the opening of gifts. Here are a few shots of the amazing things my friends gifted to me.

This is one of those adorable hooded towels. It has a monkey face on it and is so plush!

Dustin gave me these precious bibs – each is embroidered for a different holiday throughout the year (plus a cute UT bib!).

Bumbo! :)

It was a beautiful afternoon and I was so blessed by the turnout of friends and family. This whole season has been an amazing way to see those sweet friends and family that surround us and love Bronce and me so well.

Nursery Reveal!!

Wow, so we finally have the nursery done. Well… it’s about 85% done because I’m waiting on some custom framed items to come in…

Later this week some posts will be going up to show the various projects I undertook to get the room done (refinishing a dresser and side table) so I might as well get the nursery reveal out there for ya!

I don’t have any before pictures… we were so excited to get started I couldn’t get my camera out before Bronce had started stripping the room of all the other stuff. This front bedroom used to be the upstairs guest room, but about a year ago we moved my office/craft room downstairs and relocated the guest room to my old office. This small bedroom sat empty for a few months before we were ready to get started.

One of the annoyances of an old house is popcorn ceilings. Huge, resounding rounds of applause go to Bronce for spending hours and days and a few weeks dealing with the popcorn ceiling in the future nursery. Scraping, sanding, painting… and the whole ceiling flaked off while we were at a UT football game this fall. Then he had to start over again and added an oil-based primer to the mix which seems to have done the trick – now we have a smooth, beautiful ceiling.

Mom and Dad came in one weekend to help us paint over the beige walls… the “gray” color I was so excited about (seriously, we taped up paint samples and debated for weeks) ended up a dark blue. Drat! So before we did a second coat we doctored the paint Hanson-style with any and all white paints we could find in the garage. The result was a much softer light blue/gray color. Once we got the furniture and textiles in the room the walls really did pop to a soft gray and the blue tint seems to be gone.

Oh, wait… did you want pictures?? Okay. :)

Here’s the crib area.

I plan to do a monogram above the crib… haven’t decided if I’ll get wooden letters or paint directly on the walls. I’m about to undertake a painting project over the bed in our master bedroom so I’ll see how that goes and decide if I should do the same thing in here or not.

Mom did all the textiles in the room – she’s amazing! Take a closer look at the bumper pad. I love this fabric! It’s so cute. We did a solid orange on the outside and on the dust ruffle so it’s cohesive from the door, but you can clearly see this pop of pattern when looking down in the crib. I think it will be a great contrasting fabric to mesmerize the baby.

We’ll be using only white sheets in the crib.

The curtains are beautiful too. Take a look at the long view and the close-up. Sometimes it looks like fireworks, sometimes like chrysanthemums, and overall I feel like it has a sort of safari feel going on.

Mom also made the dust ruffle for the crib and is working on some large floor pillows and small pillows for the glider. I see a long future of amazing creations for the baby with my talented Mom on the job!

One of my favorite parts of the nursery is the dresser… I spent hours… seriously, like days on this thing. It was a Craigslist find that we loved and I completely refinished – filled the drawer pull holes, sanded, primed, painted, polycrylic… It was a beast. And it will get its own post later this week!

When I did the dresser I also refinished a side table that I found for $5 at Goodwill. It was previously stained and falling apart… Now it looks charming and ready to hold my beverage and book!

  To zoom out on that side table, you can see the whole glider area. After spending $80 on the dresser and side table, we splurged a little on this glider. I wanted one that was tall enough for me to fall asleep against the back and comfy enough to curl up in for hours of late-night nursing. We LOVE it! Sometimes I catch Bronce sitting in here looking around the room. I wish I knew what he was thinking. :)

Here’s a closer look at the artwork that frames the window. I found these prints on Etsy (from Sea Urchin Studio) but they were only available in a 5”x7” size. I contacted the seller and she very reasonably sold me larger prints. They were a steal!! They were actually the very first purchase we made for the nursery… back when we knew “gray and orange” would be the main colors… I found them, loved them, and bought them. I’m so glad they ended up working in here!

 

That little monkey is so cute and joyful. :) I found the frames at Michaels on clearance – they were white and pretty beat up. I took a swatch of  the curtain fabric to Lowes and matched the gold-ish yellow color to their Valspar “Maize” spray paint. The orange in the prints is very different from the orange in the drapes so I decided to go with another of the primary nursery colors for additional contrast. I think the final product looks pretty good!

I love the paper lanterns over the crib. I keep debating getting some in orange but I’ll probably do the monogram in a dark orange so that might be overkill. I’ll wait on that. (I found these paper lanterns at World Market). On the wall to the right of the dresser I’ll be hanging the ABC cross-stitch Mom made for my baby nursery back in 1980 – we had it re-matted and reframed to coordinate with the room. It will look perfect here!

The other big project in the room was painting all the trim, doors, and the inside of the closet with a high-gloss soft white. It helped make the gray paint “POP” and brightened up an otherwise nasty closet. Mom and I spent an hour at Home Depot in the closet organizer aisle making sense of my vision and designed this closet (and one for the guest room)… When the baby is in bigger clothes I can remove one of the shelving units and adjust the height to make two hanging shelves (there are two tracks running vertically that allow for these adjustments).

Well, there you have it! Our beautiful gender-neutral nursery… ready and waiting for us to get this little guy (or girl!) home! When I get a few of the additional wall accessories (we’ll also be doing a little vignette behind the bedroom door) I’ll put those photos on the blog, too.

Bonding over a Bookcase

In late January of 2010 I casually emailed my dad a link to a DIY bookcase online… we needed some storage and personality in our drab den and it seemed like the perfect upgrade. The “puzzle bookcase” was designed by Crate and Barrel and we loved it… thankfully I found the plans on Knock-Off Wood so we were able to use her design as a starting point. We discussed the plans and did some redesigns and decided it was a project we would take on together.

The den before: (the “panorama” effect didn’t quite work since my photos were exposed so differently they couldn’t be fixed in Photoshop… or at least, not quickly!) But you get the idea… big, bland wall.

One of the changes we made was to take the plans for a 6’-tall, 4.5’-wide bookcase and we stretched it a little… The finished product sits at 7’ tall and 5’ wide. As a sidenote – when an engineer and a math teacher do blueprints together, you can rest assured there will be some debates, discussions, changes, and “oops” moments. I think our final bookcase ended up a few inches shorter than 7’ due to some, um, mistakes with the estimation. Oh well, only we know exactly where we went wrong!

We started during the brutal cold of February… we took the boards and cut them all to size in dad’s workroom… then we stained each board – front, back, front, back. Whew. Each coat took a separate trip up to the lake so this part took months – especially considering I didn’t paint every time I visited! So much for a weekend project, haha!

We made a lot of observations along the way (yet not many photos, oh well).

First off, we used this Minwax product called Polyshades. It’s a stain and polyurethane combination that we found to be a little thick for our use. As we painted a flat side, if we weren’t careful it dripped down to the bottom and globbed underneath. Next time we’d use a regular stain and then do a single coat of polyurethane at the end to seal it all.

Color: Bombay Mahogany – perfect for the super dark furniture I love!

 

And… work outside. That stuff was stinky. (My parents live on a lake and replaced their dock/boat cover a few years ago… they were wise enough to move the old cover to the side yard where they do outside projects – it was the perfect spot for us to work without worrying about leaves falling on the painted boards)

By this point I knew I was pregnant so we took every precaution and I wore this fabulous mask. It was exactly as comfortable as it looks, I promise.

See, gloppy:

Also… we didn’t realize until the very end of the project that the thick stain adjusted the thickness of the boards by a tiny bit… enough to ignore when we were working with the boards at first, but later it was more complex to use the router and attach the boards in our desired method. We found ourselves scratching our heads over this issue more than once!

Rather than just attach the boards at 90-degree angles with nails as the original plans called for, Dad insisted we go with a more professional method and router out grooves for the boards to slide into. This added months to our project, but turned out to be a great addition to the beauty and durability of the bookcase.

It took us a while to put it all together and get it over to my house. Mom and Dad finally brought it over in late October and it’s perfect! It took a few weeks for me to get it properly accessorized, but I was able to shop my house and do just a little bit of picking at Hobby Lobby for some frames and accessories. After putting it in place we touched up the routered corners with a sponge-brush and some leftover stain. You can really see how finished this helps the bookcase to look.

 And… for the final view! (Scroll back up and check out the “before” to see how drab the room was… we also lightened the wall color before putting up the bookcase.)

We moved the TV to put it on an angle.

 

This beautiful clock is a Rodgers antique given to Bronce by his dad. We’ve been looking for the right place to show it off and love it in this shelf of the bookcase.

On the right (next to the brassy “R”… which I’d like to paint. Silver, maybe white… not sure yet) is a beautiful vase we bought in Athens, Greece, last Spring.

I’ve been needing a place to store my scrapbooks where they’re accessible and we’ll actually look through them from time to time. The bottom two shelves of the bookcase have these rattan baskets that hold the scrapbooks upright. I invested in these inexpensive linen books to they are all the same style – love them!