Starry Starry Bedroom

The stars in my son's nursery are by far one of the favorite design details I've ever done.

They were inspired by the stars found in the prints by Kimbery Grant.

Here is how we did it...

First we just started with the simple painted room, beige on top, green on the bottom and a traditional wall paper boarder.

Then I created a star on my computer and printed it out. I could only print 8.5"x11" so I enlarged it on a copier up to 11x17 so I could have 2 sizes of stars, one small, one large. I cut them out and used them to create an outline with painters tape on the wall.

Then I mixed a bit of the beige from the walls with white paint that we just had laying around from who knows what other project. About 1 part of each.

I simply painted the stars with the lightened paint and removed the painters tape.

One of the details that I think really helps this work was allowing the stars to but up into the windows and up onto the ceiling.

A few more finished pictures... Because I can't resist.

 

A painting projects bestfriend is

Photoshop.

Or something similar.

While planning some of the rooms in our house - I've loved turning to photoshop to test out what was going to work best for our space.

Take my son's room for example. We took this staged picture:

 And brought it into photoshop where I played with the color choices that we were playing with.

This is what we thought going in was going to be the winning choice:

Or maybe it was this:

Hmmmm... what about this:

Or...

But then this, began growing on us more and more:

Yes... the last option was perfect. So we broke out the paint and here is how close our mock up came to what we ended up with.

I'm trilled that we were able to experiment so much in photoshop before actually painting a stroke.

If you haven't seen it, here is the finished nursery.

Janie's Painting

A couple of months ago, Bug's good friend welcome a new baby sister, Janie. Being the third child in the family we knew there wasn't much they truly "needed" for the new baby so we decided to welcome her with a painting of her name.

A while back we found this wonderful scrapbook paper that we just knew would inspire something down the road.

So I painted a simple 8x10 canvas pink:

And then sketched out some of the flowers and her name in pencil:

And here is the finished piece (I can't find my "good" picture of this, and it has long since been given to sweet baby Janie.) For some reason the pink doesn't look as bright as it did in real life and every other color in the picture looks twice as bright...

Barnyard Nursery

My kids rooms are by far my favorite rooms in our house.

Here is what we did with our son's nusery, building on my favorite piece of furniture ever - the red crib we bought when expecting our daughter. The photos don't do it justice, the piece is actually stained red not painted, so you see subtle texture of the wood. I was nervous about such a bold color for a nursery but I haven't regretted it for a second. I don't think I will ever be able to part with this crib. Long after TJ has outgrown it, this crib will still be somewhere in our house.



The picture by the door, the one you can't really see cause of my flash - one of my favorite details of the room - it is of our then 3 year old daughter helping us paint the room.


The prints that came with the nursery collection by Kimberly Grant featured stars in the background - stars are my favorite shape... I'm not sure if everyone has a favorite shape, but I do. (I also have a favorite word, 2 of them actually.) So we built off that influence and painted very subtle stars around the room.


I also love how we've saved money in this room - I LOVE LOVE LOVE getting good deals.
The 4 shelves above the changing table? $3 each off of Craigs list.
The changing table itself? FREE from a coworker who was done having babies.
The bins below the changing table? $4 each on clearance at Tuesday Morning
Picture frames for the room? Bought one by one with 50% off coupons at AC Moore & Micheals
The Nursery Collection? I found it on an obscure website for about 45% off what other's were selling it for.

We're starting to talk big boy rooms for TJ... It is a little while off, but I'm really going to miss it when we do redo it.

Another closet solution

I'm going to kick it old school again here, I'm going back 5 years with this post. (I guess I should have had a blog a long, long time ago.)

My husband and I were expecting our first child, Bug, and the room we had planned for the nursery was rather small, as was our budget. It didn't help that I had my eye, and my heart set on a very expensive crib (more on that in the future.) In order to fit everything into the room, and into our budget we decided to skip the changing table by building one ourselves into the closet. (I seem to have a thing for transforming closets.)

It so happened that the closet in Bug's room was just about the perfect width for a changing table. We knew we weren't going to miss the closet, what baby actually needs a full closet height of storage? Certainly not any baby to be born from my 5' 8" husband. So we turned the closet into what became the most functioning part of the room. We had a changing station, hanging storage, baskets for laundry, toys, blankets and other assorted baby essentials. PLUS diapers, wipes and everything you could need to change a baby right at arms reach.

Here is what we came up with:

This project remains one of my favorite of all time. Once again, we hit Home Depot for some simple MDF, 1"x2" poplar, L brackets, some closet accessories and white paint. (In hind sight, I would have painted the walls some other color than white, but I was more focused on the snoopy theme, more on that some other time.) The baskets came from Target.

I wish I still had the plans to share with you, but I'll do my best to answer any questions that aren't answered by the photo above.

And as a bonus, long after we left our town house and our daughter out grew the need for a changing station, we still use the baskets all over the house. The total cost of the project, including the baskets was less than $100. Can't find too many changing tables for that price!