Well we are at that point.  We are putting the final touches on Grayson’s nursery.  We originally were going to have a twin bed in the nursery since our house has only two bedrooms.  Derek and I thought that we could still use the nursery as guest room if need be, but it was decided that storage was more important than having a guest bed.  With the bed removed, we had a large space that needed to be filled.

Once we decided on storage over sleep space, I knew exactly what type of storage I wanted.  Big white wooden cube shelving.  The owner of The Modern Baby Company recently posted pics of the nursery she designed for her daughter.  I drew tons inspiration from her design.

The hunt for white wooden cube shelving commenced.  Here is what I was looking for…

(photo credit belongs to The Modern Baby Company)

However, Memphis ain’t got no freakin’ IKEA, and all the other stores I tried just didn’t have what I was looking for.   Since Ikea doesn’t ship many of their items I would have to DRIVE to the nearst Ikea to purchase this bad boy.  6 hours to Atlanta sounded like too much work and waaay too much gas money for one bookshelf.

So after many long weeks of searching I decided that maybe i needed to give up on that dream and find another piece of furniture that would both provide storage and match the MOD style of Grayson’s room.

Enter the chest of drawers from Target.

I am now thrilled that we decided to go with this piece of furniture, because I now have so much extra storage space that I am only able to fill up 1/2 of this bad boy.  Room to grow…that’s always nice.

So, this past Saturday was spent building the dresser…

…and hanging curtains.

As a gift, my mother-in-law offered to make curtains for the nursery.  So, off to the fabric store we went.  Unfortunately, they just didn’t have what we were looking for, so off to Target we went!

Target had just what we were looking for.  Doesn’t it always?  If I could marry Target I would.  We would make beautiful children together.  Mind out of the gutter Jennifer.

Where was I?

Curtains.  We found just the curtains we were looking for at Target and the rods at Bed Bath & Beyond.  So, another project that was going on Saturday was Derek hanging curtain rods and my sweet, sweet mother-in-law parked in front of the sewing machine.

We are getting close to D-day people.  Three weeks left!  Gotta get on the ball.  I hope to be totally finished with the nursery withing the next week.  Just a few picture frames left to hang on the wall.  I’m working on the art right now in Photoshop.

Keep tuned for more status updates.

Once the walls were dry Derek moved on to tiling.

Sunday morning Derek started throwing up some tile.  For his first big tiling project he did quite well.  I myself was unable to help due to my “condition”.  I like putting my baby bump into this phrasing because it gets me out of a lot of things I don’t want to do. Tee Hee Hee.  Just kidding.  Well kind of.

I don’t really mind doing jobs like this.  I would prefer to do manual labor rather than doing dishes or cleaning a house.  You see I grew up with a dad that let me help in lots of his at home projects.  As a matter of fact, my dad and I had a tradition on the weekends.  We would watch “This Old House” together in the AM.  I learned lots of what I know today from watching Bob Vila, in all his manual labor glory, and helping my dad around the house.  I use to ask for power tools for Christmas, and sometimes still do.

Back to Derek and his first big tiling project.  Derek has tiled before at our house, but it was just the fireplace and on that project he had the help of his lovely wifey.

Pretty good, eh?

Yes, yes, yes….we did fix the crack in the wall in the image above.  Those cracks are from the interesting repair work the guys did using a combo of tile adhesive and joint compound.  Don’t worry…I went back a few days later and corrected all the cracking and un-sanded and un-painted areas.

Here he is about to get his grout on.

Getting his grout on.

I helped for about 10 minutes just so the poor kid could stop and rest his sweet little arms and back.  Grouting is hard work.  While I did my 3×3 foot area Derek just laid down on the bathroom floor and rested.  Kind of adorable if you ask me.

Grayson even helped out.  He offered his room to store all the supplies.  What a good kiddo.

Little girl helped out too.  She offered her services guarding the front door.  She made sure no mass murderers, thieves, bugs, leaves, or kitty cats made it through that front door.  Or entered our front yard for that matter.

To help spruce up the place we decided to do away with the old and outdated shower kit that currently resided in the tub.

We purchased us a newer, prettier shower kit from overstock.com.  And for quite a bargain…only $78.99.  BAM!!!

Remember awhile back when I mentioned that we had animals living under our tub?  Well we found evidence.  Check out these scratch marks.

I think the animals pulled down lots of the insulation while living under there.  The animals come back every year, so I think this happened over time….I think.

Since there will be a wee one on the other side of this wall soon we thought it would be wise to replace the missing insulation.

This is a shot from Grayson’s closet.  See how close the two rooms are.

The next step by my heroes, I mean my husband and father-in-law was to patch the walls with concrete board and joint compound.

The guys were doing great sealing up the wall and filling in the crack until I noticed they were using the wrong product to do so.

You see, the tile adhesive and joint compound are in very similar tubs, and I’m not going to name names or anything, but someone picked up the wrong bucket and went to town filling in cracks with tile adhesive….not joint compound.

(all of the white is tile adhesive later to be covered by joint compound…in pink)

Once the geniuses, I mean guys, were about three fourths of the way done I walked into the bathroom to check in on the status.  I do this because leaving all the details and decisions to the men doesn’t always work out.  Hence, the tile adhesive being used as joint compound.  I really hope my wall stays UP.  I’ll keep you posted.

The joint compound/tile adhesive took WAY WAY  WAY too long to dry, but we waited it out anyway.  Once the walls were dry, Derek moved on to tiling.

One of the projects on our list of things to do before Baby Davenport arrives is to remodel our one and only bathroom.  Do to a limited time frame and a long list of other smallish projects to complete; we’ve decided that the most important portion of this bathroom remodel is to re-tile the tub surround.

A few years back we replaced the toilet, and we think that even though our pitiful sink and vinyl flooring could use some up dating they were sufficient for the time being.  So, the tub surround it is!

Now if you have ever  been to the Davenport abode and made a tinkle you probably have noticed the “interesting” walls in our tub area.  The previous or possibly the original owners “updated” the bathroom and replaced the wall tile with fiberglass panels.  This is perfectly fine if you have say… a mobile home, where tiling a semi-permanent wall would be pointless, but in a fully planted in the ground home like ours, using real tile just makes sense.

This is what WAS on the walls….

At first glance it looks like real tile, but at closer inspection….not so much.

We constantly have insulation and other debris falling from beneath the panels.  Lately, we have been finding gnats in the tub that we believe to be coming from behind the paneling.  Talk about nasty.  This started occurring about two weeks ago.  I have to wash them down the drain every morning before I shower.

(if you look closely you can see tiny black dots in the bottom of the tub…those are the gnats)

Saturday morning Derek and his dad began ripping out some paneling, and this is what my front yard ended up looking like…

(don’t mind the random plate in the pic, Derek found it while pulling up some ivy in the front yard)

Behind the paneling the guys found drywall, uneven drywall, to be exact.  That got ripped out too.  And I’m so thankful for that, because when I hear things like, “this wall is definitely crooked” I would gladly sacrifice another day without use of my bathroom than have the job look horribly shotty.

So that uneven drywall ended up as a lawn ornament…yea!

Remember awhile back when I mentioned that we had animals living under our tub?  Well, we found evidence.  Check out these scratch marks.

I think the animals pulled down lots of the insulation while living under there.  The animals come back every year, so I think this happened over time….I think.

Just hearing the guys bang away at the walls in there and hearing the chunks of plaster crumble and crash into my pretty old tub made me cringe.  I kept repeating to myself…they know what they’re doing, they know what they’re doing.  I really hope I’m not lying to myself.

I had my trusty vacuum on hand sucking up the trails of debris the guys left in their wake.

And believe me there was a never ending trail.  So while the guys made a mess all day….I cleaned their mess all day.  Lucky me.

Since the guys were doing demo in the bathroom they hung up plastic to protect everything, but the toilet.  The toilet is a pregnant ladies best friend, ya know.

This is just an example of what I was dealing with…

This experience really makes me wish we had a second bathroom in the house.  Having to kick the guys out every time I needed to tinkle, just so I could use a dust and plaster covered bathroom, was not what I consider fun.  I hate icky bathrooms and having to tippy-toe around in that one about sent me into shock.

Well, we finally made it through painting the nursery.  Geez, I thought scraping the wall took forever.  This paint job seemed to take twice as long.  You see with Derek currently in Grad School, taking 3…count them 3 classes this semester, on top of his full time job he doesn’t have much spare time right now.  This is why I have made it my responsibility to prepare Grayson’s room before his arrival.   My poor husband already has his hands full with class, work, projects, AND a pregnant wife.  I must admit he does help out from time to time.  I personally think he rather enjoys the time away from his studies, and painting almost seems like fun compared to studying, and working on projects.

Derek’s mom came and helped us paint the room, because we had to prime the room like 57 times…okay more like 2, but it totally felt like 57 coats.  We finished with the room looking like this…BARE!

It took a few test samples to come to a decision, but we finally decided upon a color called Online.  I think it fits our geek lifestyle perfectly. If you didn’t realize the magnitude of our geekiness you can read about it here, here, and here.  I’m sure I left out like a zillion other geek posts, but in an effort not to totally bore you I will not link to those. We purchased samples from Sherwin Williams and thew some test squares up on the wall.

They look a bit bluer in the photo than they do in the room.  The top color is Online, the bottom left is called Uncertain Gray, and the bottom right is Network Gray.  We were uncertain about the Uncertain Gray (hardy har har!), and the Network Gray was just a bit too dark for us.  We wanted something that would give the room some character, but also act as a nice neutral back drop to any art we put on the walls.  I didn’t want a color that was too overwhelming.  I also didn’t want to go with the traditional blue for a boy.  So we decided on a nice gray with a tiny hint of blue.  I absolutely love it!  Oh and don’t worry…since I was the one doing the bulk of the painting, and to protect our little guy in the future we only used No VOC paint from Sherwin Williams called Harmony paint.  The only harmful fumes in this house occur when Derek takes a visit to the porcelain throne.

Since little bit L O V E S going into Gray’s room to smell the outlet, and I now begin to drip with sweat trying to get off the couch; I can use every ounce of fresh cool air I can get my sweaty little skin on.  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention….the windows in this room are painted shut. So no fresh air that way either.  Thank you previous owners!

To prevent Wrigley from furring up the room while I was painting I made a lazer barrier on the door.  Okay, so it was made out of painter’s tape, but it did the job.  She never figured out how to get though. The dog who can break her way out of a steel crate couldn’t figure out how to bust though tape.  Hmmmm.   Instead, she just watched me like this the entire time.  So cute.

First coat on the walls.  One more coat to go!  Whoopie!

Once everything was dry I had a little help with the tape removal.  Did you know dogs that are preoccupied with raccoons that live under your house make an excellent used tape collector?  They do!

Once all the tape was carefully scored and removed the room looked like this.  I had to score the tape on the floor because it had been down there so long.  Typically you remove painters tape when the paint is still tacky, but I didn’t want to tape, un-tape, and re-tape for EVERY SINGLE COAT, ya know!

I think the blueish gray looks great with the brown floors.  I never dreamed those two would complement each other so well, but they really to play nice together.  The green piece of furniture is a buffet that we picked up at our local Pottery Barn Outlet last Christmas and we had been using it for storage in what use to be know as the guest room, but now it has been re-purposed into Grayson’s changing table.

Just slap on a changing pad and a basket for some diapers and other baby booty necessities and voila a changing table for FREE!  I think traditional changing tables are kind of pointless.  You can only use them for so long, and then you have to find some place in your attic to store the dang thing once the kid grows up.  Using a multifunctional piece of furniture like a buffet or a dresser works just fine for me.

What’s your take on the color?  We didn’t intend to name our child GRAYson and then paint his room GRAY.  It just kind of happened.  The crib just arrived too.  Pictures coming of the assembly soon.  Grayson’s grandpa and daddy assemble the crib…it was so sweet.

We finally got all of the nasty old wallpaper off the wall, in the soon to be nursery. That only took about two months. That was the dustiest project I’ve ever taken on. This past weekend I sanded the wall to remove the remaining pieces of paper that the scraping couldn’t remove. Let’s just say that you couldn’t even peek your head into the room without wearing a mask (which I did). I would close my eyes often and just stay in the same small area while sanding, because I kept getting dust in my eyes and didn’t have protective glasses to wear. Dangerous I know!

My dad and little brother ( okay, he’s not so little…he’s like 6 ft+ ) came over this past weekend and finished up sanding all the floor boards for me.  I’m so lucky to have such a helpful family.  Thanks Dad & Mikey!

We have now moved from this…..

To this….

After I made it this far I had to do a lot of dust removal.  I swept up every last bit of paint and wallpaper I could get my hands on, then used the hand vac on pieces I missed,  then I whipped out the upright and vacuumed the floors, and THEN…I swiffered the floors.  After the floors were in somewhat decent order I had to wipe down every last inch of the room floor boards and all with a wet cloth.  Needless to say the next day I was in some serious pain.  My legs felt like jell-o.  Don’t worry I did have a little help…Wrigley supervised.

I stopped to eat some dinner that my wonderful hubby made.  He was upstairs all night working on a client’s website.  Since he wasn’t physically exhausted, just mentally, I asked him to whip something up to feed me and the bean.  After a quick relaxing dinner the walls had dried and I started priming.  As long as our bank account allows, we are attempting to use toxin free or “green” items when it comes to our child, so we are priming the bean’s room with a NO VOC primer and paint.  I picked up some Harmony, a NO VOC primer, at the local Sherwin Williams.  The paint doesn’t give off any fumes that I noticed.  If we wanted to we could sleep in that room without any risk of headache or strong smell from the freshly painted walls.

We haven’t settled on a paint color yet, but we’ll keep you updated as decisions are made.  Before I began the task of priming, I first had to seal the two corners where we stopped scrapping and the wallpaper picked up again.  I didn’t want that to start peeling too.  Ya know!  I used spackle to fill in and to round out the corners/cracks and then I smoothed the spackle with my finger, exactly as you would do with caulk.

THEN…I started to prime, and here we are.

When we first purchased our home we didn’t notice that just about ever single wall was covered by wallpaper and has since been painted.  About 4-5 layers of paint to be exact.

The room we are converting into the nursery is one of the wall appeared nightmares.  We noticed the paint on the floor boards and the wall began to bubble out and easily chip off.  This is due to a few sagging boards of hardwood that the floor vents rest on top of.  It seems that some air has been escaping from below the register vent and blowing directly on to an outside wall of the room.  Well, this ain’t gonna work with a baby in the house.  No way…no how!

Before we can ever THINK about beginning on the baby’s future bottomless pit of toys room; we have to scrape ALL of the chipping paint off the wall and floor boards.  SUPER!  We used a foam window stripping to close the gap under the register and keep all that escaping air heading in the right direction.

The wall demo has begun.  Let me tell you it is not moving too fast.  I am picking up a bit of speed now that I have hit my second trimester and have some energy back, but it is still a slow process.  Have you ever tried removing 60+ year old wallpaper and 4-5 layers of paint from plaster walls?  It’s tedious.  Here’s the progress of the nursery so far.

Not very baby friendly, huh?