Making a Nursery - Demo, Reno & Painting

With a little one on the way (eta 5.11.14!),
we decided to turn our smallest bedroom into a nursery.
Previously we had used it as a room for the kitties,
but sadly they got displaced to the mudroom, hehe.

The room is pretty small - about 12 x 7. This included
a long closet that spanned the entirety of the back wall. A
closet that was not particularly useful as storage and really
diminished the amount of usable space in the room.

Before we started painting any potential baby colors 
(wee!), I really wanted to nix the useless closet. Sure, 

without a closet it's not *technically* a bedroom,

but it's a lot more usable. And if push comes to shove 

we can always build in a small closet later on down 

the road for resale or something.

So after consulting Clint's brother - who

confirmed that ripping the closet out would be a 

piece of cake - Clint and I went to town on the demolition.

Erin said it would take like 20 minutes.  Ha. Ha.

Maybe it would have taken Erin 20 minutes,

but it took us 2 or 3 hours, hehe.

What Erin didn't mention was how hard fixing the room

would be after we ripped the closet out... The house is old 
and settled. When we replaced the drywall, the walls/seams were NOT flat and the ceiling was NOT level.  After copious amounts of mudding - probably about 5 rounds worth (and about 5 rounds less than was really needed) - we called it good enough.  :)

Post mudding, pre-painting.

Finally after we finished the mudding (thanks to a 
lot of help from Erin!!), we painted the room.  Yay!
And when we painted the walls and the ceiling a lot of
the unperfect and uneven elements nearly disappeared.
  

We went with a brown/taupe color palette.  
We won't know the gender for another month or so,
but we decided to just get started on the painting early 
and go fairly gender neutral. I think either baby 
blue or pink will look great with brown!

Here's the room after the painting:

Of course we did reveal more ugly flooring after
we ripped out the closet (as noted in a previous post).

We didn't make the flooring look any better with
the mud we spilled all over.  :)

Fortunately we made sure to do all the demo/reno 

work before the was carpeting installed so these kinds of 
messes wouldn't matter!  Once we got the carpet in,

the room looked so much better!

We still have to replace the floor boards which should give the room a much cleaner look overall. All of the accent painting/decor still needs to be completed too, but that will have to wait until after we learn the gender of baby nugget... and until we clear all the bathroom stuff out of the nursery!

Hopefully we can get the bathroom reno

rolling so we can finish the nursery soon too :)

Updates to come!