Labor of Love

Jul. 23, 2010

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As of this week, Dee’s Nursery – the one we started over a year ago – is finally complete. Holy crap, right? Okay so maybe finished is a little bit generous. Everything is complete, but I still have to clean and photograph the other side…which is currently stacked with boxes of her 0-6 months clothes, which I finally sorted {sobbed} through to retire. So you’re getting half a nursery tour. More to follow. (Which is kind of like my thing now anyway, right?)

This nursery has been a true labor of love for Scott and I (a labor of love so grand that it set into motion a chain of events which inspired a major life change in my husband, but more on that later…) and I am tripping all over myself to finally be able to share it. We wanted our baby girl’s room to blend with the modern vibe running through the rest of our place, but thought it should also have it’s own sense of fun and whimsy; a place for Dee to love, learn, and grow. I also had a weird pregnancy related aversion to pink and purple so I insisted that her walls be nothing of the sort, and our technicolor (read: burns a little) palette was born. Behr’s Tangy Dill won in the end, and despite immediate buyer’s remorse and a near-mental-breakdown the likes of which my husband had never seen, I eventually decided once and for all that I liked it. Looking back I feel even crazier for acting like such a freak about it because it makes the room a happy place to be, and I love the way everything pops off of it. So far, my little lady seems to agree. Her room makes her smile every time we enter it, and she definitely displays her finest “queen of the castle” attitude when we’re within it’s walls. Just as I’d hoped.

The rug is a 20$ remnant from Valley Carpet Remnant, and the Crib, as you may recall was made by my handy hubby {sheets are chocolate dot from dwell studio.} The lamp is vintage from eBay, and that’s The Easy Reader Side Table by Blu Dot for Urban Outfitters {a UO exclusive} that I lusted over and then managed to snag on final sale while x-mas shopping. The shelf is really Ikea’s Stolmen closet insert, and the chair was passed down to us by my wonderful father-in-law Barry, and then Scott reupholstered it himself. (It rocks.) The pillow on the chair is Liberty of London for Target {currently on sale}, and the teddy bear was a gift from my little cousin Adam. The elephant toy bin was a shower gift and is by 3 Sprouts from Giggle, and the Melissa and Doug Sushi play set on the floor isn’t staged, Delilah was actually playing with it there and crawled away just before I snapped the picture.

And now for the walls. The final frontier. This is what held us up all these months. Back when Dee was still in my belly I went and framed an original Valley Girl poster for her bedroom. And then I came to a screeching halt, and wrote crazy posts like THIS about how tortured I was over what to put on my baby-to-be’s bedroom walls. Originally, I had purchased and framed wee gallery’s beautiful graphic black and white flash cards to go above her chair but discovered that of the six cards three were vertical and three were horizontal, and although we toyed with the idea of staggering them, ultimately it gave us a communal migraine and we drifted back over to the Bob’s Your Uncle set {pictured} which had originally caught my eye. (The set contains 26 cards in all colors, but we stuck with the room’s native lime, fuchsia, and brown for the framing.) I swear they’re hung straight. My lens (or camera work) just make them look wonky.

{Fun Fact: Bob [no relation to the flashcard king] really is my Uncle.
Well, technically he’s Scott and Maegan’s uncle, but now he’s mine by marriage.}

For a long time I had thought I would do some sort of decal on the wall above her crib. For a short time, I thought we would fashion some sort of 3-D branch art from the corner above her crib that her IGE mobile could hang off of, but quickly thought better of it. Eventually the fates collided, I was introduced to Hoot Design Co, and, because I am a freak for type, fell hard for their Simply Yours Print. After a small framing debacle, we landed on the ikea ribba to match the frames on the Bob’s Your Uncle sextet and Scott has some very exciting plans to re-mat it in walnut veneer to match the lamp beside it. Until then, it’s looking lovely matted in the same ikea ivory as the Valley Girl poster on the opposite wall.

{we customized 15 letters of the alphabet with words and phrases
that were meaningful to us and Hoot provided the rest.}

And since I don’t want a two part nursery tour to turn in to a three part nursery tour, here is a giant collage of my favorite details from the South/West side of the room [click to enlarge.]