The Critter Room (aka "Nursery")

Things have been kind of quiet around here recently, but that's exclusively because we've been crazy busy.  We started work on Baby Hartman's room - also known as the Critter Room - months ago, and we finally finished it.  We are so excited and we both think that the whole thing is just so stinking cute. Even DH can't get over the cuteness, and he is definitely not known to use the word "cute" on a regular basis unless he's talking about Murph.

I am really sad that I don't have a "before" picture of what this room looked like.  For the first three years that we lived here, it was out office, housing our two enormous and craptastic old desks from college, as well as our bookcase, which was probably the nicest thing in the entire room.  It didn't have overheard lighting, was painted a light blue color, but only with one coat of paint, so in some areas the previous pink wall color showed through. And it had an obnoxious pink rug, which seemed to be more like an old piece of carpeting that they threw down.  Hideous, I tell you, hideous.

Anyway, get ready for picture overload.  This post is going to have a lot of them!

Before - Blue walls, lot of holes, very messy

Then we painted and added overhead lights, which helped a great deal

 After that we started work on the closet doors to take them from that weird honey color to bright white.

And the room was starting to come together.  Here it is almost ready to go.  We had decided a long time ago to use the dressers that we already had for this room.  They are solid, hardwood dressers but were stained an awful green color.  When DH first retrieved them from a rental property he brought them here and we considered just throwing them away or burning them.

But at the time we really needed something more in our spare bedroom, which currently had only a bed.  It was also at a time when I was really into spray painting things, and I suggested that we at least try that with these.  After all, we were just going to throw them away, so if it didn't work, we'd only be out a can of spray paint.  We liked them a lot after spray painting them and although it's pretty obvious that they're spray painted if you look closely, we're ok with it.  We decided to keep them and selected our other baby furniture based on this color.

This is the crib that we registered for, gifted to us by DH's mom.  I picked the color rather blindly, hoping it would work and was thrilled with the color match.  DH also appreciated that it was high quality and fairly easy to assemble so it was definitely a great purchase. 

Crib built and furniture in place

Now all we needed was the carpet.  Even though our hardwood floors aren't in great shape (they look better in the pictures than they do in real life) we decided that we had to be ok with that. They aren't horrible, just not great.  We ordered an area rug from Home Depot.com so long ago that we both forgot what it looked like, and were crossing our fingers that we still liked it and that it matched everything else that we did in the room.

But first we put down carpet padding to make it softer, since it will be a bedroom carpet after all.  And the had a little fun with the tubing, which Murphy did not appreciate at all.

And then, all of a sudden, it was done.

The carpet was amazing.  It was the perfect combination of attractive and kid-friendly cute.  The brown circles complimented the brown furniture and the green circles were almost the exact shade of the wall paint.

So stinking cute, right?!!?!?

After months and months of work, we are so excited to finally have this room done. Murph loves it as well.

You might be thinking that it's a little crazy that we finished this room so far in advance.  After all, I still have three solid months to go.  But our summer is already crazy packed, and there are only a small handful of weekends that we're actually going to be home with no plans this summer, and most of those weekends are the ones right before my due date.  Not exactly when I'm going to want to be doing home renovations.  Plus, we're hoping to spend whatever time we do have fixing up our master bedroom, hopefully before Critter arrives.

It's a lot to hope for, but in the meantime we're just glad to have this room done.  I look into that room at least twice a day, just to remember how awesome it is.  Seriously.