Babies::: The Nursery

I am so glad to say that the babies nursery is officially finished and we got it done 4 weeks ahead of my goal! We had done such a traditional nursery for Ben that I knew early on that I wanted to do something totally different for these babies. I wanted it to have a vintage-classic feel and I knew I wanted navy to be my main color regardless of the babies sexes. So first things first was to clear out the office so we had a clean slate to start with. Even empty you can see it's a pretty small room but it all we got so its gotta do!

First up was the issue of the cribs. 2 babies means 2 cribs!  Ben's crib we obviously bought in Pittsburgh but we now live in KC so we didn't really have the option to go back to the same baby furniture store and just buy another. So we searched and searched and found a few stores that had the same crib the closest store was in St Louis and the crib would be special order and had to be picked up during the week which was going to be a huge inconvenience. And the other few stores we found had crazy order and/or shipping minimums. Then my parents graciously offered to buy each baby a new crib as their gift to the babies. I knew immediately what I wanted...2 Jenny Lind cribs. I had been obsessing over them on Pinterest and knew they were the perfect size for the room. And they would fit the nursery theme so much better than Ben's crib would. But I struggled on which color to get black-cherry wood-white...my original plan was to paint them both but that plan changed down the road for various reasons. I settled on white just in case I changed my mind on painting them and figured the white would be the easiest to paint over if we did paint them. The cribs arrived the day we got the babies genders confirmed so things got really real that day! I picked out the bedding not long after but we waited until it went on sale in mid-December to get it. And it looks just perfect with their new cribs!

Next I knew I wanted something different from the standard changing table or dresser changing table. I finally decided I wanted to use an antique buffet as a changing table. The one we have in our dining room is one of my favorite pieces of furniture we have and not just because it was was my grandparents. Once I decided what I wanted it was time to actually find it and harder yet finding it in our budget. This took some time searching craigslist.com everyday and going to consignment furniture stores weekly but eventually it paid off and I found exactly what I wanted. But it was a bit more than we wanted to spend so I made the store an offer and much to my surprise they accepted it. The next day we picked it up and it was ours!

My mom (and her amazing painting skills) offered to paint it for us. She did a ton of research and found the right paint type we needed that would stand the test of time and be baby friendly. The color choice was a bit more tricky-we picked a navy but after it dried to looked more royal blue than navy blue. So my mom repainted the whole thing again a different shade. Isn't she just the best??? And this time it turned out just as I had envisioned it! It is by far my favorite piece in the nursery.

About this time I fell in love with a lamp from Pottery Barn Teen. I tried to talk myself out of it because I didn't want to spend the money. But after thinking about Ben's nursery and the Johnathan Adler giraffe lamp he had I decided it was only fair to keep with the lamp tradition. I ordered it and then got the confirmation email and it said it was on back order until February 6, 2014. Crap. It was the end of October and February seemed so so so far away but I decided to wait it out. I called and checked on it mid-January just to make sure the order hadn't been canceled since it had been so long. And I was told they were expecting a shipment in a few days and I was early in line for it so I should get it soon! Yay! And a few days later I got an email saying it had shipped and would be at our door in just 3 days! Ben & I waited all day for the UPS truck and finally at 6pm he showed up! I opened the box and loved it even more in person! So I would rank this a close second on my favorites list in nursery!

Since we were having a boy & a girl I decided that I didn't want to repaint the walls but wanted to have some sort of accent wall. After some searching I decided that maybe stenciling one of the walls would be an "easy" project and give me the look I was going for. I was away with a few girlfriends for the weekend when Vince decided to start stenciling and turns out it wasn't going to be the "easy" project I thought it would be. So after a bit more research and a bit of pleading with Vince we gave it another go and this time we Vince got the hang of it. It took a full 2 days of him working on it, some curse words and a few beers but he got it done and boy was I one happy girl! We tackled potty training & stenciling the same weekend probably not one of our best decisions but after 2 days we did accomplish two pretty big goals! This is when the decision got made not to paint the cribs. The white cribs went really well with the newly stenciled wall so we decided to save the hassle and leave them white.

After trying every single configuration possible at least twice the only way the room look "right" to me was with one of the cribs in front of the windows. Obviously the wood blinds would need to go from a safety standpoint. So more research began and we decided on baby friendly cordless blackout roman shades. We went with navy after much debate between white, tan or the navy. I figured the navy would block the sunlight best and also hide dirt from the little fingers that I know will be grabbing at them. I had Pottery Barn Kids come out to measure just to be sure we were ordering the right size and they arrived a few days later! Vince installed them without much trouble and they look great!

Storage was up next. I had envisioned nice bookcases/cabinets on each side of the buffet for the babies to have their "special stuff" on and for me to have some added storage. Well after many hours searching I kept coming up empty handed or finding something way outside the budget I had to move on to plan b. My plan b was to just hang individual shelves so now it was onto researching shelves. I found the winners at Ikea but hadn't ordered them yet when I stumbled upon the perfect shelves on a random trip to Lowes. Poor Vince had another project and this one was going to be a huge pain as we had to hang three on one side of the buffet and then had to perfectly line them up and hang the other three shelves on the other side. Luckily while it was pretty time consuming we didn't have any major issues.

Now that all the major projects had been tackled it was time for the fun part...the details! We had newly installed shelves that we needed to fill! So Vince & I went to the River Market Antique Mall to look for some treasures. We found some really cool nursery rhyme blocks from the 1920's that I had to get! Vince insisted on getting sister this little antique tiara and we found some cool old glass nursery jars. I had commissioned a lady on etsy.com to make 2 prints to frame for the babies and I just love how they turned out. Later I picked out their first banks like I did for Ben. My mom got each of the babies their first stuffed animal like she did for Ben. The rocking chair is from Ben's nursery-I still can't believe we will be rocking 2 more babies in that chair!  Everything in their room has a special meaning or story behind it which I absolutely love.

And then there was the last minute design change I thought Vince was going to kill me over. I had made some art to hang above one of the cribs but then I found these 2 sibling plaques and I had to have them! They were so perfect-perfect colors and perfect because one said brother & one said sister which is what we call the babies and had that perfect vintage feel to them.

So without further ado here is the babies nursery...

Note: There are 6,769 girl names that start with the letter A. And there are 577 boy names that start with the letter W. So good luck guessing...you'll have to wait until the babies make their debut to see if you were right!