Nursery Part One

 Warning tons of pictures ahead that will probably only be interesting to a few of you out there :)

I am so happy to be able to share baby's room with you all. Wish Grandma and Nana were here to see it in real life, but as they are not, I dedicate these next few posts to them :)

We started off with a 8.8 x 8.8 foot room {and that is not the smallest of the rooms in our apartment!}

When I think about the fact that I actually got to decorate a nursery I get all overwhelmed with emotion.  With Caed we never did one as we were moving so much in his first few years of life. Then just the whole fact that we are actually pregnant again after such struggle... Then to be in apartment where we could have a room just for her, blessing! I am pretty sure that all of our Chinese friends think we are crazy. They think it's weird that Caed has his own room (I think the cut off for moving into your own room/bed for the average Chinese child is 8-10 years old). So having a whole room for an infant is well, not normal. But I love to decorate, and doing DIY/crafty/refurbishing is a fun hobby for me personally. So most nights when C was in bed I spent many hours hanging out with Sean and my glue gun/sewing machine. 

View from the door looking in 

We got this love sign from Sean's sister Heather. I painted it white and added fabric to match baby's room. Thinking of the whole room I think we only purchased two new things, all the rest we already had and re-made, or bought second hand. Lots of DIY stuff ahead...

And a HUGE thanks to our friends Adam and Haley - when they left to go home to the US this summer she left us so much crafty stuff, not to mention the sewing machine, and chair in the corner! I think almost all of the projects that follow have some part of them that came from Haley :)

Cute bunting made from fabric scraps, poster board, sewing machine and glue gun.

The changing pad cover I also made, that was an interesting endeavor. The bottom stitching is just plain ugly, but it works!

The changing table was bought for $5 at the second hand furniture market. It took a ton of work, sanding, painting, cleaning. The mobile in the left corner was the last finishing touch (paper for that, chair, pillow, knobs and paper on shelves all inherited from H :).

This was the before picture

Knobs and ruffles. 

I made the inserts for the doors with cardboard and fabric. I learned how to ruffle on the sewing machine and added these cute little ruffles. 

On the other side of the changing table I nailed in these baskets we had. I found this 31 days of prayer for your child free printable flip book via pinterest and put that in one basket along with a song book I had made a while back. 

The shelves were black ones from Ikea that we had bought over a year ago and never hung them. So I covered them with paper (thank you again H) and mounted them on the wall. By the way I did a ton of drilling/anchoring/hanging in this room. My dad would be very proud of how well I did with the drill on these obnoxious cement walls! Thanks for teaching me to be handy like you dad!

The vase is an old yogurt bottle painted white from the inside with some fabric glued around it. Frames all from H. 

More cute art prints all about love.  The one on the right I designed in photo shop. 

This is one of the two or three things we purchased new via taobao (the little animals). 8 yuan each :) 

These are Sean, Caed & me all around 3 months old. 

This little table was also bought at the second hand furniture market. It is one of the old elementary school classroom tables they used to use here. It also took a lot of sanding/cleaning/painting (special thanks to Sean for the sanding and painting on this one).