We started working on the nursery! As I've mentioned before, even though we have a huge house, we're putting the baby in the closet. In all honesty, we don't need a nursery at all since we co-sleep the first 6-9 months, then put the baby in a floor bed, but since we did one for each of the other kids, I didn't want this baby to be left out. Plus we do need a place to put her clothes and stuff so it might as well be cute. Both of our boys sleep SO WELL right now... as long as they are alone and in their own rooms, that I don't want to put them together (or one of them with the baby) until we need to.
This is our bedroom looking towards the bathroom. The door to the left is the doorway out to the hall and kids rooms, and the archway to the right is the bathroom.
Once you're in the bathroom, the toilet closet is to the immediate left, and the walk in closet is after it to the left of the shower. I don't have a great picture, but you can get the idea.
Step one was to clear everything out.
I downsized our clothes a LOT. I think I donated about 5 trash bags full. I decided to put all of my non maternity clothes in the attic since I'm not due for another 3.5 months and it always takes me a few months after birth to fit back in them anyways. I bought new (to us) dressers on Craigslist, and 90% of Jerad's clothes are now in a dresser. I put his collared shirts and nice slacks in Marshall's closet since there was lots of room and be rarely wears them. 1/2 that closet is now Jerad's clothes, and the other 1/2 is clothes that Marshall has grown out of that Miller will be growing into, clothes that Marshall will be growing into, and clothes that Miller has grown out of that need to be sorted and put in the attic for any future little baby boys (or because I can't bear to part with them).
I moved all my clothes, shoes and purses to Miller's closet which is right next door to our room. Hopefully this forces me to pick out my clothes the night before, which has always been my goal but never happens, so that I avoid disturbing him in the morning. The kids clothes are all in a dresser under the TV in the family room which is the only way I can keep up with their laundry. So far it's been working out.
All these pictures have been taken at night, on my phone, so bear with me.
So, empty closet/nursery:
After it was empty we took down the shelf. That peeled off paint and left nice holes in the drywall paper all the way around.
We plan on returning this to a closet once the baby is consistently sleeping in her bed for naps and nighttime and not waking up to nurse every few hours. If this baby follows the boys timeline, that'll be around a year. At that point we'll put whichever 2 kids together that seem like they'll sleep the best (or if I'm lucky, all THREE together and I can have a craft room!) and build nice built-ins and make it a more functional closet than it was before. Hopefully something like this:
Simple, yet functional and custom looking.
It's not a huge closet, and I haven't measured, but I'd guess it's around 6ftx7ft. Since it's not going to be a permanent bedroom, we're trying to do everything cheap, and not spend money on things that won't be needed in a closet later. I'd like to not spend more than $150.00 total. For example, I really don't like that there's no natural light so we thought about putting in a solar tube... which we totally don't need in a future closet so we're going with natural light light bulbs and a new light fixture instead.
The walls were a horrible orange peel texture. Orange peel is bad enough, but they really did a hideous job plus the shelves pulled off a lot of the texture so we knew we'd have to do something. The options were to repair and match the existing texture, put up bead-board or some other type of paneling, or re-texture.
Repairing the texture that was there would have been super cheap, but time consuming and in the end it would still look like builder grade crap. You can't tell in the picture, but there are huge inconsistencies in the existing texture. Some places look like they were doing it with a rattle can and ran out, other places have huge globs. Not nice. Adding paneling or bead-board would have been the fastest option, and not too pricey (probably around $100 for bead-board and cheaper for board and baton), but in the end once it's a closet with clothes in it we won't be seeing the walls it would be a waste.
So we decided on retexturing the whole thing. Since Jerad does this kind of thing at work all the time, he had all the materials. I think he had to buy a bag of hot-mud because he was out, but that was around $10 and he'll use the leftovers at work. We (meaning Jerad of course) decided to do a hand scraped mission-style texture which I LOVE. We've debated and debated doing the whole house which is orange peel and knock down, but especially with our vaulted ceilings he'd want to hire someone to do it and it would cost 2-4k. Which we'd rather spend on other things, so we just keep debating.
Anyways, back to the nursery!
After the shelves were down, he mixed up hot mud and did one coat over the places that obviously needed to be patched. I think it took about 30 minutes.
The next night, he did another coat over all of the closet walls. He didn't do the ceiling because we are going to put up bead board or tongue and groove since that will still look nice in a closet. Marshall helped for a little bit before he went to bed. I think it took Jerad about an hour and a half by the time he'd cleaned up at the end.
The next night we were tired from spending the day at Gilroy Gardens took a night off:)
Sunday he put the drywall mud over the hot mud. The closet is so dark (maybe we should have upgraded the lighting FIRST?) that he couldn't tell where he'd mudded and where he hadn't so he added food coloring to the mud.
When it was wet, the color was actually really close to what we'll be painting!
Honestly, I took a few pictures then went to bed because it had been a long weekend and I was exhausted. I think that was around 10. He'd said it would probably take an hour, and Miller woke up at 12:30am and Jerad was in bed by that point, so it took somewhere in the 1-2 hour range.
The next steps are sanding, another coat or touch ups if necessary, the ceiling, adding shelves, then priming and painting. We're going to re-use Miller's yellow crib (which is why I decided to do the walls aqua and ceiling white instead of vice versa), and I bought a changing table on craigslist that I need to paint. Hopefully we can get all of that done this week so next weekend I'll be moving in furniture and making wall art!
I love love love it when the baby room's get finished. Walking into a room designated for the baby with all their little things in it is what makes it really seem real to me. Hopefully not long!
