nursery – dresser drawer saga

It’s an IKEA dresser so you know I couldn’t leave it just like it was supposed to be, right?  I wasn’t planning anything more major than lining the drawers and swapping out the knobs – I’ve seen some crazy awesome IKEA hacks on Apartment Therapy but nah…

I just went simple.  I lined the drawers and swapped out the knobs. 

Unfortunately, lining the drawers proved bizarrely complicated.  Or maybe I just made it overly complicated.  I don’t know.

The bottoms of the drawers are yellow and white stripes.  I think I’ve mentioned my distaste for yellow, right? So I bought 4 different scrapbook papers – 8 drawers, each paper for 2 drawers – to line them.  I decided that it would be easiest to do this before putting the drawers together so that I could just deal with the flat bottoms of the drawers rather than wholly made up drawers.


My materials – paper, drawer bottoms, DIY modpodge (I don’t recommend it or find better directions than the 50/50 mix of elmer’s and water that I was working with), and a foam brush.

Apply glue with brush.  Stick paper on…

and watch your paper destroy itself :(

Try the rolling pin… no dice.

Try stacking a whole bunch of flat weight on top… no pictures but this didn’t work either.  Actually, that was a complete disaster.  It all stuck together.  No, actually, first it worked but the paper peeled right back off so then I tried to put the “modpodge” on the top surface too and that stuck to everything.

Finally move on to Plan B – use spray mount to stick the paper down and then cover in clear contact paper.  That actually worked like a charm.  I lapped the contact paper over the edges since they would be hidden under the edges of the drawers once they were put together.  I figured that might add to the staying power and make for a more seamless look.

Will put the the rest of the drawers together.

With his little supervisor watching every move, of course ;-)
 
These are the smaller top drawers – the bigger bottom drawers are lined in the green polka dots you see above or pretty plain turquoise-y.

The dresser comes with dark, nearly black knobs which I didn’t think “went” with a pretty white dresser in a baby’s room.  So awhile back, I picked up some pretty pink glass knobs half off at Hobby Lobby.  I know I said that I was going gender neutral but that doesn’t mean that I can’t put in pops of girly that can be easily swapped out if the next munchkin turns out to be a boy.  I also convinced my mom to give me all the brushed nickel knobs that she got for her kitchen cabinets but had to replace since they were too shallow.  Score!

Complete!

 
Bonus – you can almost tell that the walls are 2 different colors in this picture! But – oops!, I just realized that this picture is actually from before I swapped out the rest of the knobs.  D’oh!  Oh well, other things changed too so you’ll see later.

So that’s my very basic, simple IKEA hack on the Hemnes dresser.  Here’s the first part of the story.

nursery – fill up the room

We have a room.

We scraped the ceiling free of its disgusting popcorn.

We painted everything.

Now we had to work on getting her moved in there which meant a little bit of furniture.  I wasn’t keen on putting her in there with just her crib. 

I had originally wanted to do one of those “find a dresser on craigslist and paint it” things.  Like from Domestic Adventure here.  But then I thought about my personal track record with painting drawers… ok, I’ve only done it once but, seriously, the darn thing gets stuck all the time.

So off to IKEA for the dresser that was partially the inspiration for our own custom made dresser – the Hemnes 8-drawer dresser in white.  And a chair and ottoman – we’re cheapish and just went with the Poang chair and ottoman.  I really wanted to like the Poang rocker but it costs a heck of a lot more than the standard Poang frame.  We went for the medium brown finish – it screams IKEA enough without being birch finish.

The dresser was by far the hardest piece of IKEA furniture that I have ever had the pleasure of helping to assemble and we have a lot of IKEA furniture in our house.  Here’s a few pictures:
 
Sort the pieces.

Sort the bits.

Which we cleverly, at least we thought, sorted into a breakfast tray.

And begin.

And more…

And more…

And nearly there without drawers.

We actually moved it into her room without the drawers.  I was attempting to line the drawers with pretty paper and it was taking me way longer than I expected.  So we didn’t build the drawers for a few more days.

There she is rolling around getting the lay of the land.  I actually had to take the crib apart and put it back together to move it from our room into hers.  I managed it pretty well by myself but I was afraid to put the mattress platform in without Will for fear that I would scratch the crib.  And I’m not sure why I only have a picture with the footstool in it and none with the chair.

nursery – ah, color!

I had a color scheme in mind right from the start – green and brown.  Gender neutral without a bit of yellow. 

Yellow – YUCK!

And, well, it doesn’t hurt that green is one of my favorite colors with which to decorate.

So I gathered things here and there.  Bits of brown and bits of green.  By the time we got here, I discovered that I had like 12 different shades of green in all this stuff. 

This seemed to complicate matters when trying to decide what color to paint the walls.  I couldn’t paint them green because I would inevitably clash with something that I already had for the room and any shade of mocha or tan just seemed boring for a baby’s room.  So I just forgot about it and went on with other projects  and life.

And it hit me.

Why not paint the walls the lovely aqua-y color of the blanket that Granny had knitted for her?
ok, so this picture doesn’t do the color any justice.

Aqua’s gender neutral enough for babies, right?

It had even been staring me in the face since before she was born.

See the blanket – green, brown, tan, and AQUA!  Made for her by my sister.

But how to decide on a specific color?

Grab a bunch of different paint chips and throw them on the floor with the blanket, of course! 

As I walked over it during the day over several days, I would just nix a few here and there until I got down to 2-3.  Mom and I had talked about painting the crib wall a darker shade and the rest of the walls a lighter shade. 

But in the end, there was one that I really liked but I was afraid that I was going to be too much color.  And it wasn’t part of a set – just a one off paint chip that was the perfect color.  So I had Lowes mix the paint at a half tint for the majority of the walls and “full strength” for the crib wall.  It’s Valspar Weathered Glass.

And then we painted.
 
So here’s the blank slate again…

I started with the half tint walls since there were more of them.
Same looking back toward the door – don’t worry about why the closet doors aren’t primed, I’ll get there.
Both colors up and ready for trim painting.
All done!

Ok, so I really thought that I had pictures from when I first started cutting in because it FREAKED ME OUT!  The color just seemed to be SO much color!  I’m a little afraid of color.  But I kept on painting and I was ok with it.  When I was done, I freaked out again.  But as my mom said “it’ll look different when all the stuff is in there.  So I calmed down a bit again.

But I’m used to it now and love the color! 

Now, unfortunately my attempt at an accent wall kind of failed.  You really have to sit there and study where the walls come together to tell the difference.  And you probably have to have a decent eye for color or you won’t see it at all.  Oh well.

As a kind of bonus, it kind of turned out to be nearly Tiffany blue.  hehehe.

nursery – stage 1

Stage 1 = popcorn ceiling removal.  Or let’s make a blank slate even blanker.

Have I mentioned the vendetta I have going against the popcorn ceilings in this house?  I believe that I have.

We started prepping the room for popcorn destruction in late October.

Will got me started by taping my edges.
 
But I stepped in to hang the plastic sheeting.

The baby got to hang out with a bunch of pillows to flop back on – we were still working on sitting up at the time.

I’ve explained the whole popcorn removal process before so I won’t get into it.  Actually, I can’t because I have no pictures in progress.  I had 4 days in which to complete the project between when one friend left and the next showed up.

And finish I did.  Oh – I should note that this, my 3rd attempt at ceiling scraping, is currently my best result.  It looks almost completely smooth even painted with flat white ceiling paint.

Then we primed everything – walls, trim, ceiling.  Giving us an even blanker than blank blank slate.

 

Next up – Paint!

nursery – blank slate

I like to wait until I’m finished with projects to write about them but then that means that I don’t ever blog about them and that goes against my desires to blog more. 

I’m not finished with the nursery – notice I didn’t say Pea’s room since it will be for the baby whomever the baby is until we move or are done having babies – but I know that there are folks out there interested in its progress.

So.

I’m just going to begin.

Here’s what it looked like the day we moved in:

A nice boring, beige blank slate.  Lots of possibilities.

We had the movers avoid putting anything in the room but after we started to unpack, it still ended up looking like so:

 

Plans for the room included removing the popcorn ceiling so the girl ended up in her crib in our room.

Ok, so what are the plans:
- Remove the popcorn ceiling
- Paint the walls/trim
- New blinds
- More furniture
- Hang stuff on walls
- Closet reimagined as a reading nook
- Crib skirt
- Cornice board for the window