Well. Those three months kind of flew by without a post, didn't they? Summer brings wedding & portrait season, which tends to keep me pretty busy. But also, now that we have an actual deadline looming for finishing house projects, we've kicked up the pace on a whoooole bunch of things. Little things spread out over the whole house, but all time-consuming.
Anyhoo - let's pick up where I left off, shall we?
Three months ago I revealed plans for our spare bedroom, which involved turning it into a nursery!
It looked like this at the 6 month house tour [a.k.a. the last time it was clean]:
Then I did a little photoshop mockup with some new carpet and wall color added in:
And here it is today!
The walls have been painted [Sweet Serenity by Valspar], carpet has been installed, and the whole room feels so. much. brighter. The light never gets really strong in there, but in the afternoon it's lovely and warm [this pic was taken early this morning].
We got a crib, and I adore its lovely clean lines [it's a Babyletto, and you can find it on Amazon, Target, and AllModern, among other sites]. Fabric has arrived [but is still waiting to be turned into pretty things], a vintage mirror was found, and an inherited MidCentury dresser is being polished up. I picked up a floor lamp I had been dreaming about from Crate and Barrel and eagerly set it up as soon as it arrived:
It's about a foot shorter than I'd like, but it's still sooo pretty! The mint matches the wall color almost perfectly, and looks really nice against the wood wall. But I ran into a dilemma.
So. The room itself has no overhead light, just like almost all the other rooms in the house [it's a MidCentury thing and I'm embracing it - I don't want fixtures marring the clean lines of the ceilings]. Just like in the other rooms, there are some outlets that are attached to the switch at the door. But in this room, those outlets are both on the crib wall. I don't really want a ton of light pouring into the crib, but would like to have a light that comes on when I walk in the room, so I put a regular 60watt bulb in to see what we were working with.
"oh, hello super bright light. I don't want you offending my sleep-deprived eyes or waking up my sleeping baby. .....you should leave."
A new bulb would do the trick. I've used chrome-dipped bulbs in our hall fixture at our last house, so I looked at Lowe's for one to see how it changed the light. They, of course, had nothing. Amazon to the rescue! I searched for the chrome bulbs and not only found them, but I also found something more amazing. Bulbs that are DIPPED. IN. GOLD.
I bought a 60w and a 40w to test. And of course took photos all at the same settings to help decide which is best:
A little bit softer than a regular 60w bulb, but still a little too bright...
aaand the 40w is perfect. Especially because the light spilling onto the mattress has decreased by about 75%, which means if I need to get into the room for something, or to check on her, perhaps not having the bright light on her face would keep her asleep. Just enough light to light the room, not enough to be jarring at 2am.
I made a little gif so you can see the [very clear] difference:
So! That's where the nursery is now. I have some time planned this weekend where I'll work on a few more projects, and perhaps commence with the sewing! Little by little I'll get it ready to go for her [which I'm 29 weeks as of today, so the deadline is looming. Gotta get on it!]
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With all of the things I want finished before she gets here, we've been doing little bits all over the place. And more seems to keep getting added to the [already sizable] list. Case in point, the hallway. When we got new carpet in the baby's room, we decided to bite the bullet and have it installed in the hallway and in the master bedroom. It's gotta be done sometime, so why not have it done when I don't have an infant or toddler to manage?
Here's the last time I showed a pic down the hall, with the light beige walls and old shag carpet:
And here's the new carpet, next to the stone floor: [love this carpet, btw! it looks so clean :)]
But of course I couldn't stop there. The new carpet made the beige walls look like a dirty white. And it just seemed a little sickly. So it got painted.
[just a fun shot the day before painting because my dogs are cute.]
And of course since we were planning on painting the hallway, it was high time to get rid of the POS thermostat we inherited with the house. So we got a nest!
I prepped the spot the day before the nursery and hall were painted:
[whoever painted the house before we bought it made some ....questionable.... decisions. I've found so many THICK ridges of paint in the weirdest places... Which in some places I've had to literally cut off with a knife, but in this case, a scraping did the trick]
And now it's much better - no more beige, and a pretty, easy to use thermostat. 
While I was painting the nursery walls in 'Sweet Serenity', my mom painted the hallway in the oh-so-romantic-sounding 'Wet Pavement' [also from Valspar, and one shade lighter than the color we chose for the exterior grey, since I knew it works well with the stone, and since from the hall you can see the outside of the house, and everything could live in harmony]
On the left, new carpet and dirty white walls. On the right, new carpet with gray walls!
And check out the light fixture on the ceiling! While we were at it, my mom painted the ceiling too [love her] and spray painted the metal ring on the original light fixture [scroll up to the 'before' shot where you can see that it was white].
Gives the lights [there are two] and the foyer more of a presence, dontcha think?
So! Up next I'll do some baby posts on a few other smaller projects that have gotten crossed off of the 'before baby' list!
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