presenting a complete baby nursery!

I didn't really have an official presentation of Owen's nursery.

Nuno and I never felt like it was complete until this weekend when we assembled Owen's bookshelf. It's funny that a 3 month old can have such an extensive collection of books. They are mostly board books but we also have my childhood collection of Beatrix Potter books. The shelf itself is actually constructed in a similar style to the crib (with tapered legs) and the wood matches the glider & crib in a cherry finish.

The train bookends are hand crafted and were given to Owen from Uncle Joe, Aunt Sara and Paige.

This puggy bank was given by Aunt Sandy and Uncle Paul with an engraved collar for Owen's First Christmas.


This before shot is from last July when we started the nursery. Nuno didn't really grab a very telling photo, but you get the idea. This was our spare bedroom in pukey green.

Owen's room is, we think, the nicest room in our home. Our bedroom is quite lack-luster with a high quality mattress & beautiful handmade quilt being the only items worth anything. But we wouldn't have it any other way.

baby crib

Talking about a crib to people who aren't expecting or having babies will be boring, so I apologize in advance if this is too baby obsessed. I guess when you are mere days from bringing a new person into the world, it's hard to find too many other things to focus on. For me, I'm super excited about this crib because of what it took to get it.

When deciding on a crib you can go to Ikea and pay a couple hundred dollars or you can go to Oeuf and pay a couple thousand. Then there is everything in between. What choice do you have here in Niagara? Babies R Us and the never ending supply of sleigh style cribs and the typical style cribs - all very nice but pricey and not quite what we were looking for. So Nuno and I thought Ikea was the way to go, but every time we talked about it everyone looked at us as if we were signing our kid up for a guillotine. And, to be perfectly honest, every single thing I've purchased from Ikea has fallen apart. So safety was our most important factor when it came to crib choice. One day we drove to Stoney Creek to a baby furniture store called, Baby World. This is *the* place to go for children's furniture. What an amazing selection of cribs. The more modern style ones were so well crafted and beautiful I honestly considered dropping $700 on a crib. But that would be a temporary loss of sanity. So we went home deflated and decided we wouldn't love our baby's crib - and that was OK.

Well, a couple weeks later I'm surfing Target's website and I stumble upon Dwell Studio's crib. Ikea prices for Baby World look. And the crib is highly rated and recently safety upgraded. But they don't ship to Canada and they've been on back order since spring. I told my parents about how frustrating it was trying to find a nice crib and my dad piped in that one of his golfing buddies' son lives in Amherst NY and he would find out if it was OK for us to ship the crib to his house. Once we checked the dimensions and found out that it would fit in the trunk we jumped on board. Even if the crib was on back order, the baby won't be sleeping in it till a few months down the road anyways. That very week, once we had the OK, we ordered it online and there happened to be a baby sale at Target online with the crib's price reduced! With the way the currency exchange is right now, it didn't drive up the price either. The crib unexpectedly shipped in 4 days since we happened to place the order just as the manufacturer circulated a new supply to the market. My dad picked it up on the way home from North Carolina so he was able to bring it home duty-free.

Once assembled we could not believe how sturdy and well made this crib is. The drawers are a great feature for storing fitted crib sheets and blankets. Although the wall mural was designed to have mother goose nesting inside the crib, it was hard to place furniture in front of it. But we're happy it's this crib that will sit in front of it and no other.

nursery mural complete!

A week ahead of schedule, we are done the wall mural for the baby's nursery! I'm not sure when we first had the idea of this mural. Probably in the early summer.

Here's the illustration - just the beginning. Nuno created this illustration of Mother Goose in Photoshop. My input was pretty limited. I just wanted to try using wall paper as part of a patchwork collage element to the mural. We went to Colour Your World and an employee let us rummage in the back room through all their discontinued wallpaper selection. We found three samples that worked and it cost no more than $10. We then had to match the illustration colours to actual paint samples. We used an RGB colour match system online which matched to Benjamin Moore paint samples. We bought their Natura paint so that I could help. A full can of yellow for the entire room, a half of the 2 blues and then a small sample of the brown.

We were going to use Katie's projector and draw the illustations on the wall - but with the hours it would take to do that and the possibility that it may shift in the process, that idea was nixed right away. Instead, Nuno devised a vinyl template system that worked really super well. A man on our street operates a vinyl sign company out of his home and we ordered all the shapes through him. They were then mounted on the wall and peeled off in layers as we painted.

In this photo all the masks are up. And it started to feel like we were getting some results after months of planning!

It took a couple of layers of paint to get our best result. It is so vibrant and full of life when you stand infront of it!

This was the status last week. So close! We just need to find the time to work together and stick the wall paper shapes into place. It is a large wall and just placing the shapes presented many challenges that were a lot of fun to overcome together. Teamwork! Just like what it will take to raise our baby!

This is the final result. We finished at 3:30pm yesterday. We are probably still buzzed from the thrill of finishing this project and how flawless it came out.

This week my dad's bringing back the crib from the US (a whole story onto itself), and we can place the furniture around the room. I'll post photos once that's complete!

baby's closet

Only a mom could find talking about her kid's closet interesting - but I am so stoked about how it turned out. Would you believe the people who owned our home previous to us painted the inside of all the bedroom closets? Lets see, we had dusty rose, 2 bright turquoise and purple - like this swatch:

That's what we had to contend with in the nursery, but I give full credit to Nuno for persevering in the cramped space to make sure our baby had a decent closet. I loaded up all his clothes last night and stood back to admire the adorable-ness before we put the doors back on.

Can you believe our baby already has a lifejacket (top left corner) for next summer when he swims at my parent's pool? I couldn't leave it behind in Target's discount for $5!

I hope to have the rest of the nursery pics up once I'm finished work and on maternity leave which is next month.

baby's first stuff

I'm really excited to share our first items for the baby. The baby's first onesie is from Aunt Katie! Yep, she has the honour of saying that she was the first person to buy something for the baby.

Nuno and I bought this change table from someone on Kijiji last night. We are both really adamant about buying some specific items used. What we've been finding is that most people only need certain baby items for a short period of time and there is a lot of great, barely used items available online. The whole baby industry price gouges on so many things just because they know people create registries and family and friends love to buy for babies. You should see the joy on the Bay (for weddings) and Babies R' Us when you tell them you'd like to set up a registry *ka-ching!* I want to save our friends and family from wasting their money on a $500 glider.

Next week we will hopefully know the gender of our baby which will kick the baby's nursery into high gear. Since the weather forecasts rain all weekend, we hope to sort and empty the guest room to prep for painting. Nuno is starting to think about a wall mural, which won't be one of those cheese-ball ones, but will hopefully turn out really cute. I can't wait to see the nursery come together.