Ari's Room: All Finished! Rustic-Industrial Tween Room

All done! This one took us a little longer than the nursery, since Ari was already born and there was no built in deadline....but I'm really pleased with how it turned out. And, almost as even more importantly, Ari is, too.  And now for the long post with tour and sources for everything. (I guess it would be more exciting if I did things the opposite way: did a big room reveal first and then went back and did individual posts about all the projects. But I am not nearly patient enough for all that. Plus there'd be like 4 months where I didn't have anything to blog about. I saved a few little things for the big reveal, though).

So here is the room back before we moved in:

And here it is a few months ago, right before we started working on it (we'd painted--Ari picked the color--before moving in). The original plan was much less ambitious and mostly involved painting furniture. But we got a little carried away:

And now:

I'll go wall by wall. On that wall we have the plank headboard that we made and the vintage bedside table we painted.

I was supposed to make a no sew bed skirt for Ari's bed, but....I just couldn't. It made me very tired and sad to think about. It would not have been hard, just tedious, but I'm just burned out on making no sew stuff and I was ready to be finished in here. So I went to Target and bought a fitted sheet to put over the box spring instead. Now I have seven yards of gray fabric to find something to do with.

He's very into Portal 2 these days and found this poster online, of Portal 2 if it were a 70's sci-fi movie. I thought it was pretty cool, too, and we needed something for that wall, so I ordered it.

I talked about this grouping of pictures here.

Sources:
paint: Martha Stewart's Kerry Blue Terrier (Home Depot), trim is MS's Brook Trout
bedding and pillows: Ikea
lamp on wall next to bed: Ikea
Portal 2 poster: valvesoftware.com
poster frame: Hobby Lobby
paint on bedside table (and desk and dresser): Valspar High Speed Steel
knobs on bedside table (and desk): Hobby Lobby

Moving along:

My mom found the vintage fan at a yard sale. We're planning to rewire it so that he can actually use it.

We painted the dresser with a stylized subway map design and made the curtains and curtain rods.

Sources:
Curtain fabric: "gray canvas" from Fabric.com
Union Jack box: TJ Maxx
Bing Bong print: Ikea
silver ribba frames: Ikea
Tabouret chair from Overstock.com with Ikea cushion
Tokyo skyline print from Loose Petals on Etsy

Next wall!

We made the London skyline out of plywood. We redid the desk with paint and stain. No new sources to speak of on this wall, really.

And, finally:

That's not a real dart board; it's Doink It darts. Magnets, not pointy things. We took the bifold closet doors down awhile and put that shower curtain (from Target) up instead. I'm not super crazy about it in here, but Ari wanted it to stay. I think I'd prefer putting the doors back, painted brown like the trim. But, you know, it's not my room. Behind the curtain there's a cabinet from Ikea for storage and.....a lot of stuff. But it's all behind the curtain! yay!

And that completes our tour. Here is how Ari feels about his new room. He says to say it's, "Ari approved."

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Milo and August's Room: Updated

Another room for the house tour! I'm not really meaning to not post them (up on the little house tour tab that is)  until I have them looking somewhat finished, but it's hard to work up the motivation to get it done otherwise.

Anyway, when we last left Milo and Gus' room, it was stuffed full of loft beds and I had big plans to swap them out for bunk beds, leaving more room for playing and the desk they both were begging for. Then I reported on my big plans to buy said bunk bed from Target. Then I DID buy that bunk bed. Then some months passed. And now I'm finally posting about how the room looks now.

Here's a view of the room looking in from the door. We decided on a forest room before we moved in, and I let them pick out the wall mural from Amazon. It took them a very long time to agree on one. The kids rooms were the first to get painted. Before we moved in, this room looked like this:

Stripey! So we put up the wall mural and painted the rest of it Martha Stewart's Saguaro Green. Gus has allergies, so he's not supposed to have a ceiling fan in his room (plus that one was ugly), so we took it down and put up the bamboo striped light fixture (from Lowe's, I think....last time I looked I couldn't find it on the website, though).

The curtains are from Target. We needed something right away over the windows when we moved in, because they face east in that room, so the sun comes right through them every morning. And we went the cheap route and just bought 2 panels (back when we moved in in May we were still trying to sell the old house, so money for house stuff was very tight until it finally sold at the beginning of August). Then when I regretted the decision and tried to buy 2 more, they didn't have them anymore. But I'm still too cheap to buy FOUR new curtain panels, so there they stay for now.

I mentioned the desk in my post about the shelves over it....it's a thrift store find, and I paid $50 for it. It's not terribly wide, but it's very deep; we had to take the top off to fit it through their door. I toy with the idea of painting it and/or replacing the hardware, but I think I like it as is in the room, at least for the time being. The chair is just an extra dining room chair--until I find a dedicated desk chair I like.  I think you can play "Spot the Orange Kitty" with most of these pictures. He's not really supposed to be in there, so he darts in anytime the door opens.

We made the shelves, based on some reclaimed wood shelves I saw on West Elm's site. More about that here.

Those owl containers are from Ikea. On the bottom shelf there's a giant pinecone Gus found in California and assorted animal bones that they traded for at the nature exchange at our local nature center. Also some rocks.

Toys! I'd like to build them a lego table with storage for all those legos and a top made of base plates. And maybe I will. Soon. I'd also like some comfy chairs (beanbag?) for reading somewhere in this area.

Closets. Exciting stuff, I know. This is why this room is for the boys who share....two closets. No dressers in the room, you might have noticed....all the clothes are in the closets. I'd take a picture, but it's always kind of messy because they put their own clothes away. Also because there are usually more legos in there. Legos are everywhere. Each closet has a shelf with 8 cubby holes in it, and each cubby has a designated type of clothing. Long sleeve shirts, short sleeve shirts, pants, pajamas, underwear and socks, etc. (Underwear and socks and pajamas have pull out cloth drawers to keep everything contained). So they can put everything away themselves easier than in a dresser, I think, and, again, it opens up more space in the room for playing.

Better view of the whole glorious wall mural.

(spot the orange kitty!) The cheap Target bunk beds. Comforters are also from Target. As are those lights, which were the last thing we needed to get around to finally hanging up (last night; we've had them since May, I believe) before I took pictures. I'm happy with how the bunk beds look and how compact they are, but they are more wobbly than I would like. They mostly just wobble when adults try to climb on them to make the bed or hang lights up over them or something. So it's not a huge deal. But I am not thrilled with it.

The lights make cool patterns on the walls. We should have hung them up months ago!

And the doorway, with its weird little nook area. They wanted a bulletin board, so there it is. And the owl hooks are also from Ikea.

There's not a lot of room for hanging stuff on the walls....those two walls are taken up by windows and closets, and the other two by bunk bed and wall mural. But I guess once you have a giant retro wall mural on one wall, much else would be overkill.

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A Blue, Orange, and Gray, Not Overwhelmingly Sea Creature-y Nursery: The Reveal

This nursery has a theme. I know that I'm supposed to be all, "no way. I'M a grown-up, and I'm going to spend plenty of time in this room, too, and the sooner my kid learns that the world doesn't owe him a whimsical bedroom, the better off he'll be." But I am a grown-up who appreciates themes. Seriously, I'm about five minutes away from permanently recreating Miss Havisham's wedding feast in my dining room. I did try to keep the theme somewhat....restrained, however. I am very mature like that.

We first found out we'd be needing a nursery at nearly exactly the same time we moved into this house. Sadly, pretty much the only thing on our wish list that the Boxy Colonial lacked was a fifth bedroom. Milo and Gus are content to share a room for the moment, but the fourth bedroom was being used for a guest room/office, and we weren't ready to give that up just yet.  So, ultimately, the solution we landed on was dividing our ginormous master bedroom in two and using half of it for a nursery for the time being. Eventually the baby will likely move into the guest room, and either we'll be guest room-less or we'll be ready to finish the basement by then.

I've had a pinterest board with nursery ideas for quite awhile, and a lot of the plans I made way back then actually came to fruition in some form or another. You can read about my nursery musings back in October here to see how things have evolved. But we didn't start actually DOING stuff until Thanksgiving. Which means we went from this:

Pretty much a storage room for stuff we didn't know what else to do with....to a finished nursery in about seven weeks. We seem to work well with a deadline. And without a newborn. We'll see how things go from here on out. More slowly. Is my guess.

A few notes before I share the overabundance of photos with you.

*I feel like I should say meta things about what aesthetic I was going for or whatever. But I have no such things to say. I wanted the ocean/sea creatures theme to be there, but not overwhelming. I wanted something that worked with the other half of the room, which is our bedroom and not as whale-heavy, but I still wanted whimsical and fun for the nursery side.

*I am always a little surprised at how rooms come together when I start them from scratch. They seem to wind up more modern and streamlined than I would expect myself to make them.

*This room was a beast to photograph. It finally occurred to me that this is probably mostly because the paint color is so dark. So my method was to take WAY too many pictures, at different times of day, with different lenses, then spend forever sorting through them to find the least awful ones....and hope for the best.

*Nurseries are so much fun. I think I need four more babies just so I can keep decorating nurseries. Just kidding, Dave. No more babies. I'm sure a toddler room will be almost as fun to decorate. Sigh.

So on with the tour! I'll note where all this stuff came from and give links to individual projects (there are a LOT of projects) as I go along.

Here's a view looking straight in from the master bedroom side of the room. Dave and I made the no-sew curtains with gray and orange see saw fabric from Carousel Designs. I talk about making them here. The paint that made the room so much trouble to photograph, but which I love anyway, is Benjamin Moore's Newburg Green.

The bookcase was a garage sale find many years ago. We gave it a fresh coat of paint for its new life in the nursery and covered a piece of cardboard cut to fit the back with squid fabric from Spoonflower. Read about the bookcase project here. The lamp is from Target (ordered online). The prints above the bookcase are from Studio Tuesday via Etsy.

I found the fish at TJ Maxx. He's supposed to hold a votive candle, but open flames and babies don't really mix, so he'll just sit around looking cute instead.

The stuffed seal is from Ikea. The kids bought me the Alcatraz snowglobe when they (and Dave) went to California last spring and left me home to paint the kitchen cabinets in the old house. Gus thinks it's too scary for the baby, but I think he'll be okay.

Moving right along...it's the next wall! Along with the corner. The rocker is a Poang rocker from Ikea. The dresser was Dave's dad's, then Dave's, and then has been in all of our kids' nurseries or bedrooms. We repainted it and gave it some fancy new whale drawer pulls from D. Lawless Hardware. I talk more about that here.

I can't remember where I got the paper lanterns. Uhh....I googled "paper lanterns" and ordered them from one of the online stores that popped up. Originally, these were supposed to go over the changing table. But then I had to move the mobile there so that nothing would cover up our friend the whale, so we put these here instead.

I found the "Seals & Sea Lions" book at the thrift store. The Nantucket book is from the real Nantucket, where Dave and I went on our honeymoon. Gus bought the plush sea lion for me/the baby for Christmas (aww!). The starfish were at TJ Maxx. The lamp is from Target; it used to be in Milo's room at our old house. And the diver's mask was a happy find at Hobby Lobby. I kind of love it. And it was half off.

The photos (in Ikea Ribba frames) are ones I've taken over the years on our family trips to Cape Cod. More about them and better views of them here.

Gus' sea lion again. Aww!

Continuing on....here's the room divider curtain. The curtains are from Ikea, with ceiling mount curtain rods from Wal-mart. More about how we did that here. And the dresser started out ugly. Read about how we made it prettier (and added the legs to it) here.

I made the mobile and talked about how I did it here.

The hardest part to photograph, because that whale wants to blend right into the wall, particularly once the camera is finished dealing with all the white board and batten. Anyway, it's the last wall of the nursery! The crib is the Sundvik crib from Ikea. The lamp is the Stella Floor Lamp, on sale from Urban Outfitters (there's no overhead light in this half of the room, hence the three lamps). You can't tell, but the crib sheet is very soft. It is from Target's website.

DIY projects on this wall include the no-sew crib skirt to match the curtains, which I talk about here, the board and batten, which I talk about at great length here, and the whale, which there is not yet a separate post about, but that's coming up. Her name is Martha.

The pillow is from Ikea. Oh, and you can kind of see how nice and soft the crib sheet is. If it would only get below 70, it would be very cozy for the baby to sleep on.

What the whale actually looks like. It was the last thing we did in here (less than a week before my due date! Cutting it close!), so it's the thing I'm currently the most in love with. I'll write up a separate post about how we made it either later this week or, if I have a baby soon, then....just....later and tell you how we made her. It was easier and less fraught with worry and trouble than I expected.

I don't want to stop writing about the nursery, but I think I'm all finished now. I still can't quite believe it all actually came together before the baby was born. And I don't know quite what to do with myself now that it's finished. I really can think of LOTS of things to do with myself (and my house), but none of them seem quite as fun or gratifying right now as making, say, a big wooden whale.

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