Week 21

+ Charlotte is moving quite a bit these days. I can feel her kick from the inside but not from the outside (as of yet anyway).

+We started planning out the next phase of the nursery project. I would like to get supplies this weekend and start some of the prep work but I am not sure if that will happen or not.

+ Little girl stuff is SO much fun to shop for!

+ I am really struggling with energy in the afternoons lately. Nap time should be part of any pregnant womans work day.

Week 20

I am little late with the week 20 post, considering today marks week 21!

 + Week 20 consisted of two doctors appointments, one of which was my anatomy scan. I am happy to report baby is not only healthy but also... still a girl!

 + Tim's parents offered to buy us our stroller. Since we selected a travel set, it also came with the infant car seat. We went with the Britax system. Lola got to go for a spin around the house... she LOVED it!

+ We also finished Baby's dresser! More on that here. Its still sitting in the garage but we hope to bring it into the nursery over the weekend ( Side note: I will be SO glad to be able to park in the garage again!)

+ I am up 7 pounds to date! At this rate, I am not sure I will stay within my 20 pound weight gain goal. My doctor keeps assuring me I am "right on target" but its HARD to see the scale creep up... even if it is for a good reason. Maybe I should just not look?

+Week 20 also introduced me to my first prenatal massage... WONDERFUL!

+ Baby Girl also has a name... Charlotte Grace!

Refinished Dresser

I mentioned here that I ended up getting a second hand dresser off Craigslist to use in the nursery. I went to Babies R Us and was shocked to find that most of the dressers were in the $700 range. I had always planned to use the dresser as the changing table instead of purchasing a stand alone changer but I was not anticipating the price for that quality of furniture.... a lot of it was particleboard!

I really love the look of two-toned furniture so I decided to start skimming Craigslist for a used solid wood dresser. The very first day I came across one I liked but thought I was rushing into it. A search a few days later showed that it was still available so I sent over an email and made plans to look at it the following day. It is a solid wood Thomasville Dresser with dovetails and hidden "jewelry drawers". It has a small blemish on the top which  didn't bother me in the least since we had plans to refinish it anyway. We quickly handed over $140 and took this guy home with us! 

The first thing we did was remove all the drawers and hardware. 

As you can tell by the stacked boxes, this was in the middle of our lighting project! 

The hardware was very unique and I contemplated keeping them and giving them a coat of ORB spray paint.  But in the end they got donated to the Habitat for Humanity Restore. They did leave us with two sets of holes in each of the 6 regular drawers. 

Next step was to get supplies. Since this was our first time refinishing furniture, we opted to borrow a sander as opposed to purchasing one. My dad let us borrow his Dewalt sander and luckily he had a ton of sandpaper as well so that was another savings. I did purchase a few 2 inch drawer and cabinet rollers, 2 trim trays made for the smaller rollers, primer, paint, wood filler and spray poly.

Since I knew I wanted a two tone look, we had to strip the top of the dresser and the two hidden drawers of all the stain. The bottom portion was only getting painted so we really just needed to rough the surface up so that the paint would have something to grab on to.

Tim started the sanding but quickly got bored and opted to go fishing instead.

 Meanwhile, I patched the hardware holes in the drawers. I just used basic Elmer's Wood Filler. I put on one thin coat, let it dry for an hour and then added a second coat.

While the filler was drying, I took over the sanding. The pregnant lady had to take lots of breaks but eventually got it done!

I started with coarse sandpaper and gradually worked my way down. On the top I used coarse, medium, fine and very fine sandpaper until a reach a nice even texture that would be ideal for staining. On the bottom portion I skipped the coarse and very fine paper. The worst part of sanding... the dust. It was EVERYWHERE. I waited for Tim to help me clean up the dust so we could get a coat of primer on the dresser that evening.

I purchased Zinsser primer since I heard good things on other blogs. I wasn't impressed and actually prefer my usual Valspar primer. I purchased this stain blocking primer. I purchased good paint that supposedly didn't need primer however since I opted not to sand it down to raw wood, I thought primer would work in my favor. The coverage was very inconsistent and although I only used one coat of primer, it probably needed two to be a good base for the paint. We rolled a quick coat of primer that evening and let it dry overnight. Since it is oil based, we opted to throw out the roller and pan and start over with fresh the next day.

On to paint. I have heard AMAZING things about Benjamin Moore's Advance paint. I went to the local Ace which carries Benjamin Moore since there isn't a regular Benjamin Moore Store near me. They didn't sell the advance formula but gave me the name of another retailer locally that did.  He also gave me a bunch of paint samples to go home and color match before heading to the other store. I held the samples up to the crib and selected "Super White".
Let me tell you, the paint ain't cheap! I purchased a gallon and it cost me $50! I opted for the gallon because I have some other upcoming nursery projects that will need it but I definitely could have gotten away with a Quart. After 4 thin coats on the dresser, I still have almost a full gallon. It is a self- leveling paint with alkyd so it hardens and has a really nice finish. It is recommended for drawers and cabinets, really anything with movement. Definitely worth the extra cost!

Like I said, we opted for 4 thin coats because we still had a lot of stain showing through the primer. They recommend 24 hours of drying time between coats and 4-5 days of dry time after the final coat before attaching drawers, doors, etc. So we simply did a coat a night after work, which maybe took 10 minutes?

Next up.. staining! We actually didn't have to purchase any stain for this project. Turns out the stain I purchased for this project was a dead match to the crib we selected. It is Minwax Red Mahogany.

Years ago, my dad used to professionally stain cabinets for a living. So he asked if he could stain the top of the dresser. Here he is hard at work.

He used cheesecloth and we applied two coats of stain to get the right finish.

After the stain dried completely, we were ready or polyurethane. I purchased three cans of Rustoleum's spray interior poly in gloss. We made sure to protect our white paint by taping a plastic tarp around the bottom portion of the dresser.

In between coats of poly, he used extra fine steel wool to remove any dust traces that bubbled to the surface. I think we used 2 1/2 cans of the poly for a total of 4 thin coats... which got us a really nice sheen.

Back to hardware. I selected two knobs from Lowe's.

The top knob was the cheaper of the two but I really felt like the size of the dresser called for something a little larger. Ultimately, this guy won the race:

Installing the hardware officially wrapped up the dresser project. Here is what the final product looks like:

 Oh and because I love comparison shots. Here is what we started with and the how we ended.

 I am in love with the way it turned out. I originally thought about  staining the drawers too but I am SO glad I decided to keep the whole base white. It looks so much better that I could have imagined and ended up being significantly cheaper that its $700 Babies R Us counterpart. I think we probably spent around $100 on supplies ( would have been less if not for the Advance paint but I have SO much left over). Not too bad for $240!

Closet upgrade in under 5 minutes

Since the back bedroom is becoming the nursery(more on that here), Tim and I have to address everything we have stored in those two closets over the past two years.

One of the issues is we do not have a hanging bar in the guest room closet. And because we had the empty back bedroom, we forgot about it.  Now that we are in clean out mode, we decided to fix the issue. The guest room closet at one point did have a rod, as evident but the holder marks on either side of the closet.

So I went to Lowe's and spent around $15 on two items:  White plastic Closet Rod socker and an expandable closet rod. 

Tim was working on another project and this was a one (wo)man job. I used simply attached the sockets inside the existing marks, since this clear was a good height for the rod at some point.

Ajusted the length of my bar to the wideth of the closet and attached the bar through the middle support bracket.

It seriously took my less than five minutes...which is good considering how much longer than expected it is taking to clean out those closets in the back bedroom! I am trying to get rid of as much as possible and took a few items to Clothes Mentor the other day as well. Unfortunatley, my husband is a pack rat. Anyone have any ideas on how to convince him he does not NEED to keep a 5 gallon Rubbermaid container full of empty CD cases? Cause I am at a loss....

The Nursery Plan

The back corner bedroom of our house had remained untouched for the most part. Right after we bought the house we replaced the carpet and added some colonial moulding but it is still a pretty blank slate.

Its pretty much just been our "junk room". This room is going to become the nursery but presents a challenge because it has: 1) double windows and 2) double closets. So basically there is one "free" wall which happens to be where the entry door is. Here is what the layout looks like: 

Furniture layout is definitely going to be a challenge. Now that we are starting to pick things up for the nursery, I have  been thinking a lot about layout. As I mentioned here, we did get a second hand dresser that we plan on refinishing so I try to factor in the size of the dresser when contemplating layouts. I am not crazy about the idea of the crib being placed under the window but I also feel like its odd for it to be on the same wall as the entry door! Here is what I have come up with so far. 

Option 1: Crib under the window on the back wall, dresser under the other window and glider on the entry wall. Maybe with a bookcase or additional storage. I also added a rug in the center but am undecided on shape, color, etc at this point. 

Option 2: Crib under the window to the right when you walk in the door, rocker and some type of bookshelf under the window straight ahead, and dresser on the entry wall. 

We are a long way from adding furniture into the room at this point but I am concerned with how everything is going to come together. The room definitely has it challenges in terms of layout. I did however select a paint color and all the walls have been painted at this point. We are planning on adding some decorative trim  which we are still in the "planning" stages of. We also are so close to being finished with the dresser which looks AWESOME... all it needs is some poly and hardware and will make its appearance. 

Week 19

+ The belly continues to get rounder by the day. I am trying not to be too scale conscious because the idea of gaining a TON of weight freaks me out. I am a little curious to see what my gain will be at my doctors appointment next week.
+ More and more people are coming up to me at work saying " We thought you had just gained weight, we had no idea you were pregnant". I guess at 5 months a long there is really no hiding it anymore!
+ I started the baby registry... talk about overwhelming. I feel the need to read reviews on everything which leads to indecisiveness and very little actually being added to the list.
+ Tim and I did go walk around Babies R Us to see some strollers and other things first hand... sometimes reviews can only go so far. We made some baby purchases so I will post about those soon.

Boob Lights No More

When we moved in, our house was FULL of boob lights. Because it was a flip, they were fond of these lights which are $21 for 2. Surprisingly, they get very good reviews and we had no issue with them other than finding them ugly. We replaced several right away... not for aesthetics because of functionality...we simply needed something that threw off more light in our master bath and office space.

Last week, I shared how we replaces a semi-flush boob light in our guest bath. That really just sparked us to replace the remaining two boob lights in the house. One of them was installed in the entryway and its mate in the hallway with the guest bath and 2 extra- bedrooms.

One Saturday I was walking around Lowe's waiting for Tim and spotted this light hanging on one of the displays. 

Tim really liked it as well and we decided it would work great for our entryway. See the Oil Rubbed Bronze (ORB) guy below him with the awesome Edison bulb? He came home with us too! 

Both lights are buy Allen and Roth. The gold mosaic light was $89 and the Edison bulbed light was $54. 

The hall entryway light was a breeze to replace. We simply disconnected the power, removed the old fixture, matched up the wires and installed the new fixture. 

The Edison bulb light... not so easy! After shutting off the power, We removed the existing light and found this:

A 7.5 inche hole in the ceiling with paint sticks running across for support. The electrical in this house always seems to hold surprises.  Needless to say, our light fixture did not cover the opening. So we went back to Lowe's and purchases a ORB ceiling medallion. This was rather easy to install and matched the finish of our light fixture. 

However, because we added the medallion the mounting screws provided with the light were now too short. Enter another trip to Lowe's. 

Last night we finally got the light up. 

I love the yellow light given off by the Edison bulb. It provides the perfect amount of light for the hallway and the best part is that we know have a boob- light free house!