A Nursery to Grow Up In

Ahhh the dreaded nursery debacle! I am always so sure of myself, I know exactly what I want and then I go out and get it. However, when I found out I was pregnant I knew the days of having a room closet right next to our bedroom were over. Soon it would be transformed into a sanctuary for my little human. Every woman wants a room completely devoted to clothes and shoes and I had it! Check it out.

I searched Pinterest for months trying to decide on a theme, colors, ANY ideas for my son’s nursery. I seriously couldn’t decide what I wanted to do. I ended up pinning so many ideas I was stuck with having too many ideas and only one room to do them in. Eventually I ended up narrowing down my favorite ideas and then set my colors, I went with black, white, and green with the chevron as my pattern, no theme. I also kept my chandelier. It had taken me forever to find when I looked for one for the pink room so I couldn’t let go of everything and my husband gave me permission to leave it. He said he knew Roman needed some sparkle in his life just like his momma 😉 A man that knows his wife’s needs is a good man lol!

The first piece I knew I wanted was my curtains. I waited for those to be finished before I even thought about doing anything else. Because they would be a large part of the room. If they didn’t look right I was going to have to go a different direction.

I came across the following pin on how to DIY your curtains with large chevron stripes but it was impossible to buy them anywhere. I put a plea out on Facebook asking for someone to help me out and do this for me and a friend of mine took on the task. To say she did an awesome job is an understatement. Mine look JUST like this. I forwarded Stefanie the blog where Ashleigh detailed how she had DIYd these curtains. You can find her blog here. I know this was not an easy task for Stefanie and she about lost her mind doing it, so this project is not for the faint of heart. I used the exact same curtains from IKEA that she used and they turned out AWESOME.

I had an entirely different setup for the room but I had specific pieces I was working around. I had wanted the curtains to be down and open like these are but to fit the room right they ended up being pinned back. I couldn’t make a pretty bow, this was going to be a little boy’s room!! So I thought why not a bowtie? Still classy but in a boyish way.

I also wanted to keep the light out. But you know what is almost impossible to find? A black shade that blacks out the light and doesn’t cost an absolute fortune. I did some searching in Lowes and found this Levolor fabric blind in a light tan color,and bought two cans of black spray paint to get the look I wanted. My dad had to do the spray painting since I was about 7 months pregnant at the time and it absorbed fast but covered well and it looks like it was a black blind from the beginning.

The dresser was actually the most stressful part of the room. If you look at the very first picture of my pink room you can see that the dresser was a piece I already had. It was solid black and it was fine. However, I thought I needed my dresser to look like the one below. I recruited someone else to paint it and once I got it in the room it just didn’t work at all. So dad to the rescue again,  he stripped off the chevron stripes and I repainted it black but still wanted chevron stripes. I used the zigzag frog tape and I like it but still really wish I would have just left it alone and opted for white pulls instead! Oh well I’m not screwing with it again.

This sign was a bear and took my mom and I an entire afternoon and evening to get the chevrons just right. UGH never again. We taped off the chevrons and once the sign was dry I took to task getting the writing on there. It would be a lie if I told you I had free handed this sucker so I will be come clean and tell you the truth. I learned an old trick back in junior high. I printed the words in a font I liked and then made my husband take a pencil and shade the back of each strip of words. This acts as a stencil. Once that is done I could then take a pencil and trace over the letters and it showed up on the sign which I could then paint over. I’m a genius I realize this 🙂 When we got it up I thought it seemed kind of bare around the outside so my friend Caiti sewed together some black stars cut from paper and made me some garland. I like it a lot better with the garland strung on as a border. 

I’ve had these shelves since I was little bitty. My dad made them and I used them for years in my own room at home. However they weren’t painted black so pulled that paint can back out and I got to work. There are 3 pieces on this shelf that I got really excited about. Check out the glass jar full of binkies (not my idea I saw it on Pinterest)! The little book? My husband and I have been asking each other that since we were in high school and we’ve always given each other the same responses (no I won’t tell you our responses). When I saw this book I thought it was so fitting. Finally, the fluffy white bear. This was a purchase I made around Christmas time from a local vendor who raises llamas. The bear is made of real llama hair and it’s just wonderful. I’m in love with this little bear and it’s up and out of the way so he can’t get to it and drool on it lol!!

You will notice I tried to boy this room up some more with the vintage Hulk and Spiderman signs. They were a last minute choice when another piece for the room fell through. I actually kind of like them and my husband had the final decision on which two we kept. He’s not a Spiderman fan but given the room colors and overall look of the signs these were the two we kept. That small rocking chair was actually a gift from my dad’s side of the family. He grew up with 3 sisters. They passed down this rocking chair that has been in my family for years. Needless to say I bawled my eyes out at my baby shower when they handed it off to me for my little Roman to have. The pillow on the rocking chair I got from Etsy, you can find a link to her shop here. I only ordered the pillow case as I had an old pillow we didn’t use anymore and thought that was more socially responsible. 

 The crib was an absolute disaster, I ordered a BLACK crib from Babies-R-Us and it came to us like a dark cherry brown. Of course we wanted to get it up so I just painted the sucker black. I still have to post my review and hope they send me some kind of wonderful gift card for my troubles. Not to mention it was a Graco crib and the directions to put it together didn’t match the pieces they gave us. It was a nightmare.

I ordered both the crib sheet and the skirt from Etsy also I have linked their stores for you. My aunt made the amazing blanket. That was another one of my baby shower gifts that I was just in awe of. Such a beautiful quilt and it matched his room perfectly!

I went back and forth with the decision to buy or make the marquee and I’m really glad I decided to make it because it was actually pretty simple. I cut the backs out and went totally ghetto on taping the little lights in. I got the lights from lights.com and the paper mache letters from Hobby Lobby. I won’t turn them on much but each letter has its own battery operated lights (and yes I realized when the project was finished that somewhere in the DIY process a light in my O went out grrr). It’s the overall design that counts right? Not the actual functionality of it??

My husband cut 2 wooded pieces of board down to fit my pictures which I actually just printed from a computer in black and white on paper. I modpodged them on to the wood and then use a paintbrush to distress the edges with black paint. Super easy.

I had been looking everywhere for a cross to put above his crib and couldn’t find anything I liked so up until a couple weeks ago I was just going to leave it bare there until I found something. As I was leaving Hobby Lobby empty handed I spotted this burlap cross in the clearance section but it was not in the right color green for the room. I thought it would be easy enough to just take a black sharpie to so that’s what I did and voila!

One of my last finds for the room that just had me in a fit of excitement giggles was the star light I found at Target. Super cute, easy to use and it can be hung or set right on the dresser. It even comes with a little remote. It fit right in with the little sign I wanted to use in the room and the star garland over the chevron sign on the wall.