One More Nursery Furniture Post: Free Dresser Turned...Not as Free (but Better)

I do not, I'm sorry to say, have any whales or squids to offer you today. But I do have just one more article of furniture to share, and despite its lack of aquatic life, I think the transformation is pretty dramatic.

We already had one dresser for the nursery, but, while it is very pretty, we thought a little more storage would come in handy in a room with no closet, AND we wanted something more changing table height. When I mentioned this to my mom, she told me she had picked up a dresser recently, planning to refinish it and sell it at her shop (A Classy Flea, where you totally need to go if you find yourself in the Atlanta area), but that we could have it instead if we wanted. Thanks, Mom!

We picked it up from her house, and, well....it wasn't the prettiest dresser ever seen. Someone had already done some creative refinishing to it:

Oh my....white, green, AND purple! How....interesting. But it was a nice, solid (Ethan Allen) piece, so I was certain we could make it beautiful. When I was first looking at fabric for what turned out to be our bookcase project , I was thinking I would use it for this dresser somehow. Like maybe covering the drawers with fabric. Only see how they have that fake two drawer where there's really only one thing going on? Yeah....I just couldn't make it work in my head. I was pretty sure it would end up looking sloppy at best. So we opted for embellishing the bookcase with whimsy instead and keeping this dresser a little less exciting. A whale dresser and a squid bookcase is probably plenty of whimsy for one baby.

So we decided on pale blue paint and new brushed nickel hardware. We also opted to put some legs on it while we were at it, partially to make it look nicer, but also because it was a little low for changing table height.

Legs first. We went to Lowes and found these little knobby things to go on the bottom. 

They were about $7 each, so our free dresser was already up to a $28 dresser. Then we picked out hardware. This is where the fake drawer effect really got us, since it nearly doubled the cost of the hardware. We got brushed nickel cup pulls for just under $4 each, and then three knobs for the top drawer for around $2.50 each. So what are we up to? That's another $40, so $68. Then a quart of primer and a quart of paint. I give up; I'm done adding. Under $100, more than $68. We'll use some of the primer and (maybe) the paint for other things, though. 

For paint, we picked Valspar's "Ghost Ship" in a semi-gloss. Ghost ship! Oceans! I pick out the wine with the prettiest label and the paint with the prettiest name.

We came home with our spoils, and Dave set to work getting the legs on.

He's out at the movies, or he could explain this better than I'm about to. But perhaps the picture will fill in the gaps. He screwed these blocks of wood (scrap wood that we already had) into the inside corners of the dresser first, to make a big enough base for the legs to screw into. I forgot to mention that we also bought those metal plates to attach the legs to. They were easy to find because they were right next to the legs in the store. Then he, uhh....screwed the legs in. Yep. See? Okay, I guess how it works is the legs screw into the metal plates first, and then you attach the whole contraption to the dresser, screwing the plates into the wood. 

I was little worried about wobbliness, but it's nice and sturdy. You'd never know the legs weren't always there. 

Finally, he filled in the screw holes on the side with wood putty.

Then he sanded down the whole dresser with the power sander. He was gone forever. When he came back, and I went out to look, most of the awful green and purple paint was all gone. "I told you you just needed to kind of rough it up before we primed it," I said.

"Did you say that?" he asked, "I should really listen to you better."

Oh well. Anyway, we put a coat of primer on it and then the Ghost Ship. We used a little foam roller instead of a brush, and it went on so nicely and brushstroke-freely that I can't believe I've never figured out to paint furniture this way before.  Remember how I wanted a pale blue dresser? Ghost Ship looked pale blue on the card, but on the dresser it looked pretty damn white. Like a ghost, you might say. Once we got it upstairs and in front of the white curtains, it started to look a little gray and maybe a little blue, if you squinted the right way. But it still looks nice. And there's plenty of color in that room already, so maybe it's for the best. 

We debated to polyurethane or not to polyurethane, but the glossy paint looked so....finished when we were done that we opted to forego it. 

Ethan Allen apparently likes to use hardware that is really, really close to a standard size (the pulls we bought were 2 1/2 inches) but not quite. It was close enough, though, that Dave was able to just make the hole on one side just a tiny bit bigger with a drill bit, and the new hardware fit just fine--no wiggling!

It's in front of the room divider curtains now, the last free "wall" in the nursery. I think it will have to move to somewhere where we can attach it to a wall once the baby's moving around on his own, but it's fine for now.

It looks like a totally different piece of furniture!

Hmm...I guess it does look kind of blue? ish?

Sharing with:
Thrifty Decor Chick's January Before and After
Tuesday's Treasures at My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia
Hookin' Up with House of Hepworths
Chic on a Shoestring Decorating's Flaunt It Friday
Design, Dining, and Diapers Inspiration Gallery Link Party
Miss Mustard Seed's Furniture Feature Friday
The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday
Lovely Crafty Weekend and Lovely Crafty Home
Tater Tots and Jello's Weekend Wrap Up Party
Funky Junk Interiors
Classy Clutter's Spotlight Saturday

Back to work! No-sew curtains for the nursery

No more of this taking time off for Christmas nonsense; I am 3 weeks and 1 day away from my due date. Predictably, doing the board and batten right before Christmas did not actually happen. But we made up for it a bit by spending the evening before Christmas Eve making our very first no-sew (or, umm, any kind of) curtains.

In contrast to the mobile, I was pleasantly surprised by how quick and easy this was. It's nice when that happens.

I came across this fabric a few weeks ago on Carousel Design's website:

Carousel Designs

....and I decided I must have it. I had been thinking of just a plain gray and white chevron, but this was a lot more exciting. And not too expensive, at $7.50 a yard. I ordered 6 yards, and I have enough left over to make a skirt for the crib. I got away with this, however, by making two panels out of the 54" width, which was pushing it a bit. I think I'll be fine with it on these windows, but if I were going for a more formal look I'd want them wider, which would mean ordering twice as much fabric. A dilemma I'm giving a lot of thought to, because I'm hoping to make another set for the dining room soon. 

Anyway. I read through this post on Young House Love before starting, but, honestly, there's not a whole lot to the whole thing once you know that HeatnBond iron-on hem tape exists. You just cut and iron and make four big rectangles, and you have curtains! 

While we were working on them, I told Dave that I think "I wasn't really a perfectionist about this" should be the new subtitle of this blog. We measured so that things would be pretty much the same length and all that, but we knew the panels were going to be all wavy and bunched up in the end, so we didn't worry overmuch about perfectly straight edges or anything. 

I won't get into a step by step tutorial since there are a million of them out there already and since it's pretty much exactly what you expect anyway. Here are a couple of pictures of the process:

We folded it in half and ironed down the seam before cutting it down the middle.

Gavroche thought he should sit on the fabric because he's orange, too. Incidentally, the colors looked darker on the website. I was a little disappointed, but I still like it.

This is what the hem looks like after you make it. No sewing! Exciting!

Our iron was happy to finally have something to do again after a long, LONG vacation.

The whole process took maybe three hours start to finish, and I suspect the next set we make will go faster since we've had some practice. We picked up brushed nickel rods and clips at Lowe's the next day and hung them up. New camera did its best rising to the occasion of taking backlit pictures. Not too much backlight, since the sun hasn't been out here for days:

Sharing with:
Happy Hour at Design, Dining, and Diapers
Under the Table and Dreaming's Sunday Showcase
The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday

Kvar-FAIL: the story of a room divider

Quick review: when we first realized we were going to need a nursery (and that we didn't want to give up the guest room for it, at least not right away), we planned to hire someone to put up a wall with french doors, dividing our ginormous (29 by 13) master bedroom into two sections. Then this started to seem....expensive. More expensive than necessary. So we switched gears and decided to put up a cheaper and more temporary room divider of some sort instead.

When we last left off, Dave and I were staring helplessly at the Kvartal curtain hanging system section at Ikea, thinking that surely if we went around a corner there would be a useful (and very lengthy) explanatory poster of some sort, or maybe an actual full time Kvartal assistant to answer our many, many questions. But no. If there's one thing Ikea's short on, it's explanations. We finally gave up, figuring that when we returned sans kids everything would make itself clear.

This did not happen. We found ourselves there again, weeks later, no kids in sight or earshot, just as confounded by this mysterious "system" Ikea had come up with. As near as we could tell, the deal is that if you want to use the Kvartal panels, you are in pretty decent shape:

They fit right into the little Kvartal track, and you can slide them around, and all is well. But this is not what we wanted. For one thing, the selection of panels is a little lacking. They come in very limited colors and patterns, and all the ones that might have worked were very thin and translucent. I know anything short of a real wall isn't going to offer a whole lot of privacy, but we did want something we couldn't actually see through. Ikea also needs to replace the display Kvartal panels a little more often if they want to move those things. The ones there were all beat up and frayed and looked like they wouldn't last an hour in our house. (Is this the part where I add a disclaimer that Ikea is not compensating me for my opinions on the Kvartal system? Sorry, Ikea; you know I love you and lust after your Strandmon chair, but the Kvartal stuff needs some work, IMHO).

So. If you are not impressed with the panels and want, instead, to get some of the regular old curtains that are "compatible" with the Kvartal system....you would think "compatible" would mean there is some way to just buy the curtains and the track and some kind of....clips or something, and go hang your curtains up, right? I would. This certainly does not seem to be the case, even though we spent a lot of time in Kvartal-land, examining every Kvarcessory and trying to make it so. You do buy little packs of clips to fit into the tracks. But then you also have to buy this strip of clip-holding fabric that you take home and sew onto the backs of all of your curtains before you can use the clips.

Now. I do own a sewing machine (I don't know where it is right now, but I know there's one in the house somewhere) and I guess, in some very generous definition of the word, I "know" how to use it. But I prefer not to. Sometimes I see people on the internet make cute pillows and whatnot, and I think, "maybe I should do that sometime." And then I don't. The idea of sewing something like 18 feet of this little fabric strip thing onto the backs of curtains made me want to cry.

"I think you can do that," Dave encouraged me.

"Maybe Kristi would help me," I said doubtfully.

The end of the saga is that we finally decided the Kvartal system was too much trouble for too little payoff and that there MUST be an easier way to do things.

We left Ikea with some cheap curtain rods and hardware that we hoped to somehow rig up so that they would hang from the ceiling instead of the wall and 6 white (non Kvartal compatible) curtain panels that we intended to put on said cheap rods:

Merete curtains, $24.99 for two panels

Then we came home and thought about it for a long time and ran into a few flaws in the plan that would likely make adapting our cheap Ikea rods and hardware more trouble than it would be worth. Also, we thought to ourselves, we couldn't possibly the only people who'd ever wanted to hang some curtains from the ceiling to make a room divider.

Google and Walmart came to our rescue. Walmart's website sells exactly what we needed, which turned out to be the Verona Ceiling Mount Curtain Rod. We ordered three of them, waited for the notice that they were ready to be picked up at the closest Walmart, and we were ready to hang a room divider! (Walmart's not paying me, either. Not all of my opinions on Walmart are as positive as this one about how easy it is to get ceiling mount curtain rods from them).

Then we got to work!

First we had to decide how big to make the nursery part of the master bedroom. The final decision was more or less arbitrary, helped along a bit by outlet placement....we ended up deciding to put the curtain 10 1/2 feet from one wall. So the final dimensions are something like 17 1/2 by 13 for the master bedroom part and 10 1/2 by 13 for the nursery.

Next we made marks on the ceiling in several places to make sure the curtain would go straight across the room.

I stood on a step stool by the wall and held one end of the tape measure while Dave stood 10 1/2 feet or so into the room on a stepladder, held the other end, and made Xs in pencil. Then we moved the ladders a few feet and did it again. And again. And again. Then Dave took the first picture of me ever to appear in this blog, I believe. See? Pregnant. And yet on a stepladder. I am SO dedicated. Also, you can get a preview of the Newburg Green, albeit a cruddy, flash-illuminated one. I am very in love with it.

Then I sat on the bed with my laptop and ordered pretty lamps for the nursery and picked out fabric for curtains while Dave screwed the brackets into the ceiling with anchor screws and cursed a lot.

This was a tedious process. We had three rods, and each needed three brackets to hold it. We decided to put the middle one just behind the ones on either side, so that the middle curtain  panels could overlap the ones on the sides and not leave any gaps.

Then we put the curtains on the rods, the rods through those little loops, and we were done! The curtains are 8 feet long, and so are our ceilings, so it worked out very nicely. They're almost flush with the ceiling and they pool on the carpet just a tiny bit.

Here it is in the light of day, all finished!

There are six panels total, so we can open it up anywhere, but there's probably going to a dresser on the other side in the middle, so we'll probably mostly use this spot as the "door." It's closest to both the door to the room and to where the crib will be, so, assuming I'm growing a baby who will stay asleep for transfers to the crib, that will be convenient.

In case you're wondering why we forgot to paint the bottom half of the wall there, that's where the board and batten is going.

And, since my iphone camera has a far wider lens than my real camera for some reason, here's one more shot from it:

I'm feeling much better about the status of the nursery now. We haven't even dipped into Dave's winter break yet, and the only really BIG project left is the board and batten. There's maybe an hour or two of finishing up painting to do (I mean, not counting the painting associated with the board and batten), and everything else should be little things that can, with luck, be finished in an afternoon. I mean an afternoon each, not an afternoon for everything all together. But still! We're getting there!

Cost breakdown:
curtains: $75 for three sets of panels
brackets and rods: just under $100 for the three rods

Linking with: Hookin' Up with House of Hepworths, Transformation Thursday at The Shabby Creek Cottage, The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday, Tuesday's Treasures at My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Chic on a Shoestring's Flaunt it Friday

The Other Christmas Decorating Post

In years past (most of them anyway), we have done things like going to tree farms to cut down our own tree, or we've gone places that had hayrides and cocoa and visits with Santa to complement their overpriced trees, or, at the very least, we've gone to a less elaborate tree selling place but sprung for the Noble Fir, which was crazy expensive and absolutely beautiful. 

This year (pregnant!) we went to Home Depot. Home Depot is about 7 minutes from our house, and I think we were back home within half an hour of leaving our front door. I would have bought a Noble Fir if they had them, but no. Fraser Firs as far as the eye could see. 

Our tree! We pulled it out of the big pile of trees and picked it our ourselves!

The guy trimming the trunk for us has a cowboy hat, which makes the whole thing extra festive!

I thought it would be funny if they posed in front of this sign, pretending to be really excited about the chainsaw. I was right. Note that Milo is perfectly appropriately dressed for the weather in his short sleeved shirt here. SO Christmassy. But today it was 42, so maybe we should have waited a week.

I took a picture of the sign so we'd never forget the magical night.

And here it is, all decorated and lit up. It's no Noble Fir, but it will do.

Our Christmas decorations are not exactly what you might call....mature. Also, I couldn't get a good picture of the whole Christmas zoo. This was the best I could do. We have a Christmas zoo. A couple of years ago, the kids got gift cards from Sears from one of Dave's uncles. Rather than buying clothes, which is not super exciting for kids, we opted for starting a Christmas village....and the Christmas village stuff that was left over after Christmas  was mostly from the Lemax zoo collection. Which is cool, because what says Christmas more than....a zoo?

We just added the zoo entrance this year.

Here's the petting zoo.

I don't think the Santa actually goes with the zoo, but he could visit, right? This one moves!

What else have we got? Well, these guys from Rudolph. I tucked them in on top of the Old Lady Cabinet in the dining room. There used to be more pieces, but stuff happened.

The Playmobil nativity scene. Maybe someday we'll get a grown-up one.

The Holly Jolly Santa! My brother and SIL gave this to us Christmas of 1999. They told us it would help keep us entertained if all the power went out for Y2K, but then we opened it and realized it only plugs in...no battery back up. Fortunately, if you'll recall, it turned out not to be an issue. Santa dances to Alan Jackson singing "Holly Jolly Christmas." The best feature? The "repeat endlessly" mode that the kids are fond of setting him to. He's sounding a little....tired this year. I am worried that his Christmases are numbered.

So there you have it. It's a little....sparse compared to other people's amazing mantles and entranceways and whatnot, but....pregnant! Next year I will use my nearly one year old for an excuse instead.

Decking the Nursery Walls

Remind me never to decorate a nursery at the same time I'm trying to get the house ready for Christmas again. It's a little much. Anyway, we did the tree last night and some other stuff here and there, and I'm saving that all up for a grand Christmas post over the weekend for the next Dare to DIY challenge on Monday.

In the meantime, a quick nursery post. I mentioned awhile back that I bought a few prints from Studio Tuesday on Etsy:

Studio Tuesday

I was really excited to come across them because they're lovely, and the perfect colors, and have all kinds of ocean-y stuff. 

Then I decided to use a few of my own photos from our various trips to Cape Cod over the years. I have the prints (8 by 10s) here now (from Mpix, which for the moment is my go to Kodakgallery replacement for prints. RIP Kodakgallery), and they're waiting to go in some white Ribba frames from Ikea (as are the Studio Tuesday prints). Here are the three Dave and I picked, after sifting through an embarrassing number of pictures:

This is from Nauset Beach in Orleans. I loved the light and everything here, but I was wishing someone had left a rustic little dinghy or something for me to get a picture of instead of that kayak....until I decided on some orange for the nursery and was glad it would fit in so well.

Rocks on the very rocky beach in Falmouth, where, until recently, Dave's family had a house. Sadly, I don't like the composition as much in the 8 by 10 crop. But what can you do (you know, other than get a 5 by 7 or something)?

Dave grew up taking the Island Queen from Falmouth to Martha's Vineyard (you can walk to it from his family's beach house), and I joined in when we started dating in college. We'll have to make sure the new baby gets to go on it sometime, too. You can't really tell very well from the picture, but it has orange seats. Pop! I wish that guy up there had left for me to take the picture. Oh well. I guess I need to figure out photoshop and stuff, so I can make things like him disappear. 

It's a smallish room (well, we haven't made it yet, with the curtain, but I'm guessing around 10 by 13? The 13 part is set. Definitely something by 13), so two groupings like this plus the big wooden whale (over the crib? As long as we secure it well enough that it doesn't fall and smoosh the baby) (not to mention board and batten on one wall) may well be enough. I'll have to see when we get it all in there.

Nursery: The Master To-do List

First a few notes:
*The Advent calendar continues to be a hit. Today we're making giant paper snowflakes.
*I think I need a totally non-fun version of the calendar for me. It would say things like, "mail the property tax check before you have to pay a penalty, you dummy!" "do some laundry," and "get to work on those photo books; it's almost Christmas!" Sigh.

Okay: nursery!

We had big plans to paint last weekend, but then there was that whole hurt back/Christmas Carol/house guests thing. So we did...nothing instead. With the nursery, anyway. I am starting to get panicky again, but Dave has a 2 week vacation coming up, so we really ought to be able to knock everything out then.

REALLY!

The list:
1. hang curtain room divider
2. get everything out of there that doesn't belong in there
3. sort through diapers (yay! did it yesterday!)
4. finishing framing and hanging pictures
5. paint! (paint--Benjamin Moore's Newburg Green--is already purchased)
6. install board and batten
7. refinish the other dresser once it gets here
8. make a whale
9. finish washing, sorting, putting away clothes
10. hang light fixture
11. find a lamp or two
12. paint bookshelf
13. adorable accessories
14. make a mobile?
15. put crib together
16. buy changing pad thing for dresser #2
17. find curtains

See? Only 17 things! We can do that, right?

A lot of the things will lead to their very own blog entries, but a few explanatory notes in the meantime....

I mentioned our childless trip to Ikea awhile back, which was mostly for nursery stuff. We were there at the tail end of their Black Friday sales, and all the plush toys were half off. Normally this would be of only slight interest to me, except that we discovered that Ikea is currently embracing sea animals in the same way we are! What luck! So we picked up this guy:

And these ocean friends:

There's also, I just discovered on the website, a shark. But we didn't see him. And sharks are a little scary for a nursery anyway.

A good portion of our Ikea time was spent staring helplessly at the overwhelming Kvartal curtain system display. More on that later, but we did not purchase any Kvartal components in the end. We bought other things. And we're still not sure how that's all going to work out.

We also went ahead and bought a rocking chair. I wanted something a little more exciting and original than the Poang rocker, but....well, it was there, and it was not too expensive, and it was comfy when I sat in it. This is the one we got:

And then there is this pillow. We actually bought the same pillow a few months ago, then returned it when we were leaning toward woodland animals instead of sea creatures. So we bought it again, and this time I'm keeping it:

What else? Oh, perhaps "make a whale" requires a little more explanation. I have a good number of smallish framed things in mind for the walls, but I wanted something big and exciting, too. I kept looking at this map:

It has sea monsters, you see! But the sizes available all seem to be really wacky and irregular and I could never figure out how I'd manage to get it framed without spending a fortune. So I finally moved on.

Last night I came across a really cool wooden whale cutout for sale on Etsy....for $89. And then I thought that it didn't look like it'd be TOO tricky to make ourselves. I can sketch it, Dave can break out his jigsaw, then I can paint it. I think. I found a blog that confirmed that I should be able to do this on my own (though it was a little sparse on details). So, like this, only bigger. BIGGER!

Source: Completely Coastal

Do you want to know something? Trying to get a blog entry written while simultaneously doing school with children is a little more multi-tasking than I can handle. So I will stop now! 

Nursery: progress at last!

So let's see....we've crossed putting in hardwood floors of the list. I think we've pretty much decided the bathroom tile will have to wait, too. (I guess I should say more about that, since I kept insisting it was SO IMPORTANT. Thing is, the master bath is right over the unheated garage. And it's a huge room with one lone heat vent in it. And we've come to discover, as nights have gotten colder, that it's a very, very cold room. And the small part that already has tile? OMG. SO COLD at night on bare feet. We need to rethink this. And maybe hold off until we can save up for some under the tile heating? We're exploring our options).

But even with this reduced to do list, progress on the nursery has been very slow indeed. Much slower than my pregnancy, it seems, which is a terrible combination. We have less than 8 weeks (or so)! I mean, not that the baby will really notice whether or not his nursery is finished, at least not until he's old enough to focus on things more than 8 inches from his face. But still. I notice.

So we took advantage of having grandparents around to make a childless trip to Ikea (which, really, I have to say, is the only way I can handle a trip to Ikea without snapping at everyone. Crowds make me grumpy. And Ikea always has crowds. And no rides, unlike Disney World, so really, what's the point of dealing with the crowds? Unless you need a room divider for your nursery or something like that. Anyway. More on the Ikea trip and its spoils later.

Even before the Ikea trip, we painted the dresser! The dresser that was Dave's Dad's, then Dave's, then all of our other kids' at some point or another. Even though it has all that beautiful family history and is a pretty cool little retro piece of furniture, I have to admit I was getting kind of tired of it. It had been in EVERY kid's room, after all, and it had looked exactly the same since we first refinished it before Ari was born.

It looked like this:

It had this black and white speckled finish on it originally, that Dave's grandmother did back when Dave's dad was a kid. We painted it white (presumably we sanded it, too, though I don't remember the details) and put cute little animal knobs on it (where there had been black handles). And then it sat around getting dingier for 12 long years.

The other day I mixed up some chalk paint (I can't stop!) and we got to work. My original plan was for the whole thing to be the same gray color. We used Behr's "burnished metal," and I was very pleased with it, particularly given that I spent 5 minutes at Lowe's picking it out instead of obsessing with online pictures and paint chips for forever like I usually do. I wanted a very light, close-ish to white, gray. Once the gray started going on, though, I decided I wanted something a little more exciting. Like how's about painting the drawers and door a different color? So daring.

I went back to my never ending supply of paint samples from the library/dining room and pulled out Benjamin Moore's James River Gray, which is the color one darker than Nantucket Fog on the same card. We'd decided it was too dark for the rooms downstairs, but I love it on the dresser. LOVE it.

Then a coat of wax and the new whale knobs (which have been sitting in a box, patiently waiting to be used, for quite awhile now).

I'm so happy with how it turned out! I am officially re in love with our little piece of family history dresser. Now we just have to do...all the other things.

Here it is!

Linking with: Transformation Thursday @Shabby Creek Cottage, Vintage Thingie Thursday @ Colorado Lady, Chic on a Shoestring's Flaunt it Friday, The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday, Miss Mustard Seed's Furniture Feature Friday

Miss Mustard Seed's Furniture Feature Friday