The Dude’s Room

Well my friends, no baby just yet!  I suppose he’ll come when he’s ready, but making his poor mom wait 5+ days after the due date?  He sure knows how to make an entrance 😉

 

So I promised a looooooooooong time ago to show pictures of his room once we got it all in working order and honestly it hasn’t been until just recently that we actually completed it all.  We have a 3 bedroom house with 2 bedrooms on the top floor and 1 on the bottom floor, and pre-pregnancy we had our bedroom and an office upstairs with the bottom room as a guest bedroom.  Now that we have need for a nursery we had to do some changing around of the rooms before we could ever get started – our room is still upstairs, but the office has turned into a nursery and the downstairs room has turned into a guest bedroom/office area.

 

Because it was so horrendous for so long (we got sidetracked with life and holidays and such) I only have one before picture, which was actually after we took out the office furniture:

One thing that I was pretty adamant about (and that Nate was not upset about) was that I didn’t want to paint the baby’s room.  It has nothing to do with paint fumes or using the right kind of paint – y’all, this is out of shear laziness.  See, when we bought this house we knew that we didn’t want it to be our forever home and I just KNOW that I’m not going to want to repaint or justify some crazy kid room colors whenever we decide it’s time to move.  So no painting for us.

 

That doesn’t mean that we didn’t want color though!  In fact more than anything I wanted to have a lot of bright colors, and really nothing that would be pastel or baby-ish.  Neutrals are fine, but when it comes to baby bedding and decor I couldn’t find anything that was what I wanted.

 

So we decided to make our own.

The crib we got from a friend of ours (thanks again Shannon!!!) and bought the changing table/dresser on Craigslist.  We got a neutral colored glider/rocker/recliner from a local furniture warehouse because it was literally the only thing that offered any sort of neck support for me – being tall is great but sometimes there are disadvantages.  We bought two bookcases at Ikea – one in a neutral wood that sort of matches the crib, and a metal one that can be repurposed later for just about anything.

For the bedding we went to a local fabric store that was going out of business around the holidays with my mom and dad, and my mom made the blanket and bumpers (which we won’t be using at first) for the bed.  For the sheets we just stuck with a neutral color that we could match with just about anything, which I love.  And the stuffed animals?  Yeah, they’re just keeping his bed warm for him 😉

Instead of painting we decided to blow up some of the photos that we’ve taken on our trips, saturate the heck out of them, and hang them in his room.  Since we wanted to keep going with the surfer/island theme we also included some pictures of Nate and I surfing on our honeymoon along with this great photo of my dad surfing in Guam when he was in high school!

I’ve had this mirror for years and years and thought it would look good in the baby’s room.  Plus I’m sure I’ll need to utilize it (for him or for me) at some point.  The only thing that’s missing from the room now is a MASSIVE map of Texas that I’ll be framing and hanging on the right side of the mirror and then we will be taking pictures of his grandparents aunts/uncles and him to put up somewhere around the room so that he’s always surrounded by the people who love him 🙂

Oh, and one more thing:  see that little teddy bear on top of the book case, next to the lamp?  When we lost our first baby our friends Robbie & Stefanie gave that to us as a little momento of the life that we lost so suddenly.  We wanted it to have a special place in the baby’s room so that as he gets older he’ll always know he’s being watched over by his older sibling.  We love both babies so much and are always holding them in our hearts!

So there you have it – a baby room with lots of color, lots of light, a big brown dog and a theme that we love!