Before & After: The Nursery

I'm having a hard time getting used to referring to our old guest room as the nursery. Why is this so weird to me? I stumble over my words most of the time and end up calling it the "guest room nursery."

That does not mean if you are a guest in our home that we will force you to sleep in a crib. It just means that, for me, the word nursery may be a little scary. Somehow, I manage not to freak out when I see my swiftly growing baby belly. I cannot put any logic behind what freaks me out and what doesn't.

Anyway, when we get to the end of this blog post and you see the after, you will most likely say, "big deal, that looks like a normal room." In fact, it is a big deal that the guest room nursery looks normal, because it used to look like this.

We also used to call this room the LSU room. Not hard to see why.

It was explained to us that the previous owners let their grandchild pick out the color scheme. The carpet was in excellent condition, but ugly as sin. And the wall color reminds me of one of those three pre-approved colors that campus housing allows students to paint their college dorm rooms. Overall, this room makes me feel very sad, and nurseries shouldn't be sad.

Ty and I always said that we would get to this room when we needed it for a nursery. I believe that looking back, Ty and I will always say that we wish we would have done it sooner. It's one of those "grass is always greener" scenarios.

Our plan was three-fold: new paint, crown molding (there was something in place, but didn't look right), new carpet.

The plan extended into the nursery bathroom that was also painted the sad dorm room yellow color. The bathroom has some really cute, old blue tile that we wanted to keep. But it needed a fresh wall color and some crown.

Whoever previously stayed in this room must have had some behavioral issues because it looked like the walls had been stabbed to death and then patched. The patch job was maybe worse than the original damage, so we got a painter in to retexture and smooth out those rough spots.

Then Ty and I began to paint.

We went with a very light greyish neutral color for the walls since all of our nursery furnishings and fabrics are more vibrant. The change at this point isn't very dramatic, but it is an improvement. I think it was good for me and Ty to be able to splatter as much paint on the carpet as we wanted. It was therapeutic to show that carpet just how much we hated it.

Finally, last week our carpet was installed.

It's so normal.

And clean.

There are beautiful, original hardwood floors under this carpet, but we decided to preserve those for later. Plus, the carpet will help to keep our nursery nice, quiet and peaceful.

As soon as Ty walked in the door, I had him help me move Tilly's dresser into her room.



This will make a great changing table and is the perfect size for her room.

I'm so glad to have a clean slate with this room. I hope it will be enough to erase those LSU colors from my memory! I can't wait to keep putting Tilly's room together and see it all once it's completed.