Becoming Monkey-Ville: Part One

I didn't originally intend on sharing the nursery reveal in two separate posts, but once I got started I realized there is just too much for one. So today I will share all the work that we the Fabulous Dude did to get the room prepared for baby and then you can come back tomorrow to see the Big Reveal!

I just realized that I do not have any great "before" photos. The photos all seem to start at the "during" stage.

The room that we are using for the Little Monkey's nursery used to be our spare room/office/ scrap booking room/place where we stash everything that doesn't have a home room. As you can well imagine, finding new places for all of these things proved to be quite a challenge. Thankfully, with my completely grad school a few months ago, we were able to significantly minimize the amount of "office" space we need.

Here is a little peek at what the room looked like before (the last three are more "during" photos as I took them once I had already started pulling stuff out to condense and get rid of):

Once I emptied the room of all of my office supplies and other junk, I moved on to the scrapbooking cabinet. You may remember that this was a job I was not pumped about. But I got it done!

After that was done, the next step was tearing out the old carpet. The Dude took care of this job one weekend early in July while I took care of finding a home for the last few items that were hanging around the room.

We were lucky to be able to keep the paint colour in the room the same because it matches perfectly with the decor I chose. There were a few nicks and holes that needed to be repaired, and the Dude decided to repaint one of the walls because it wasn't in great shape. I even helped with some of these tasks.

My parent's own a flooring business, so we are lucky to have the hook ups for flooring products and expertise. My Mom and Dad headed down to our place for dinner one night after my first shower to bring all of the baby's goodies and so that my Dad could lend the Dude a hand and help him learn how to lay carpet.

After the carpet was done, we were ready to start bringing in and arranging the furniture. Speaking of furniture, I just realized I have never posted about what we did about furniture. We were blessed to be given a crib by a lady at our church, and the Dude transformed two other pieces of furniture that we scored for free; one to be a change table and one as an armoire. Although I'm not showing you the finished product today, I will show you what he used to make the change table out of and the way the armoire looked before so you know where it came from when I post the final product tomorrow.

This became the change table:

And this is the armoire:

We had all three pieces painted white by my Dad's painters and they look like they are brand new!

The Dude set up the crib and brought everything in and we discovered that there was just too much for the tiny room.

With the scrapbook cabinet, armoire, change table, crib, and black leather chair the room was just too crowded. Thankfully we were able to solve this by moving the scrapbooking cabinet out to the laundry room (I found a new home for my completed scrapbooks on the shelf above my closet in my bedroom so that the humidity and moisture in the laundry room doesn't ruin them). Now, it's housing our board games and a bunch of baby stuff that we won't need until a few months down the line.

Sadly, we realized that there was just no way we could arrange the room in a way that didn't look completely jam packed and keep my black leather chair in there. It's part of our living room set, but we've never really been able to use it because the way our living room is laid out, there is no room in there for it either. We debated what to do about the issue, whether we should sell the chair or not. We both decided we didn't want to sell it because, likely, someday, we'll have a home where we can use it and we both love it. So, we decided to put it in storage for now and found a different, much smaller, chair and ottoman for $40 on kijiji to put in the baby's room (which you'll get to see tomorrow).

Even after we got the black chair and scrapbook cabinet out and the new chair in, it took me quite a while to find the perfect arrangement for the furniture to maximize our space and have the room look the nicest possible. Thankfully, my SIL Logi has the magic touch and found the perfect arrangement. She even helped me move everything around while the boy's were out getting ice cream! And when they arrived home, they didn't even notice.

After everything was in its proper place, the real fun started and we got to work on putting away his/her things and Monkifying (that's a word, promise) the space.

Come on back tomorrow to see how it all turned out!