The Reveal begins...

As you all know, Doug and I have been slowly renovating our house... we've been at it for just over a year now. I've had many people ask me to post some pictures of the transformation... so here it goes! Instead of doing a huge post to show all of the changes, I thought I'd do it one room at a time. I've decided to do it this way for two reasons-- one-- they're all not finished yet (rooms in my house are ever evolving and changing as I dream up a new project) and two-- I really don't have the energy to clean the entire house, photograph it, then write about it :)

So... I figured it would be fitting to start with the nursery! Let me start by showing you what we had to work with. What a beauty, eh?  I'm sure this room was well loved by it's previous owner... but I had something a little more sophisticated in mind.

Nursery Room Before

The people who lived here before us had quite an obsession with colour-- bright colour, in every shade, and lots of it (stay tuned for more images of shocking paint jobs).  When we first moved in a year ago, we knew that we couldn't tear the entire house apart all at once since we didn't have the time or money.  But I could not live in a rainbow house.  So we primed everything twice, and then repainted the main floor.  It took a week.

The nursery was a special case.  Not only was it painted in a shade of purple I could not live with, but the picket fence/garden mural was painted on so thick that even after covering it with a different colour, you could still see and feel the picket fence.  Thankfully we had a friend who was willing to spend several hours in that room with a palm sander (Go Brent!!) to get rid of the sun/butterflies/birds applied to the top half of the room.  The picket fence would have taken months to sand down-- so instead we had to find a different solution!

Nursery after demolition-- oops!  Forgot to take the pictures down...

Doug installing the wall panelling late into the night!

Fast forward to the fall-- Doug and I have now torn up all of the flooring on the main level of our house. Remember this post?  After installing laminate throughout the main floor, we decided to tackle the MASSIVE job of re-doing all of the baseboards, casings, and crown moulding.  As we didn't take any time off from work to do this project, we ended up spending every evening and weekend working in our house together till 11 or 12 each night.  Doug was in charge of cutting and installing, I did all of the filling, sanding, and most of the painting.  Took us weeks... no... make that months.  Some of you may be wondering how our marriage has survived projects such as this, but we actually have a blast working together.  Those late nights were hilarious at times...  

To solve the picket fence dilemma-- we opted to install style and rail panelling to the bottom half of the room.  As we were finishing up the panelling in the room, we discovered that room would soon become a nursery.  We figured that the panelling would look great in a nursery, but decided to repaint the top half of the room a beautiful blue (the right blue can be gender neutral, eh?)  After spraying the the room and doing some repainting the picket fence was a thing of the past, and the room looked beautiful.  

To make the room more conducive to housing a small child, we decided to tackle yet another project in this room-- the closet!!  This room has the smallest closet in the house.  

Before shot of the closet

While babies have small clothes, they also come with lots of other stuff!  How I managed to store and organize all of Caleb's baby stuff in our tiny condo still remains a mystery-- actually, it was more of a miracle.  We didn't want to spend a lot of money on this project.  Actually, we didn't want to spend any money on it-- we're a little bit cheap at times (blame it on the Mennonite heritage:)  So, Doug creatively managed to find pretty much all of the materials needed to build custom closet shelving lying around in our garage.  We had ripped a few cupboards off of one wall in the kitchen, so Doug was able to re-use one of the tall pantry boxes for the closet.  After cutting it down a bit and making a few modifications he installed it in the closet along with a few more shelves he built out of scraps of material.  After a good paint job and some new closet rods-- project completed!  For less than 10 bucks (we had to pick up the parts for the closet rods) we put custom shelving in the closet.  Here's the finished project!!  Don't I have a wonderfully creative and handy husband?

So, that's the miraculous transformation of the nursery!  Keep in mind... this did not happen overnight.  All of the major grunt work happened last fall, while the organizing and decorating was finally finished recently.

If I had a few more dollars to my name, I may have made a few changes.  But in the end, creatively using what you already have and searching for good deals (and I mean REALLY good deals-- the as-is section in Ikea, MCC Thrift store finds, or clearance section in Home Sense kind of deals) is more fun in the end.  Once the baby arrives I'll make a few more adjustments depending on whether we have a boy or a girl.  But as of now, it's ready to go...