Nursery progress - sort of

I had such high hopes for all that we'd accomplish this weekend in Baby's nursery. Sadly, here I sit on Monday morning and the only thing that's officially "done" is the light has been hung. It was like the home improvement gods were out to get us or something. Everything we started went wrong (even the light wouldn't cooperate at first!)

Things started off really well though. I picked up my re-upholstered rocker on Friday afternoon and am very happy with how it came out. Excuse the crappy iPhone picture. The finished product is a cream chenile with black piping. As a reminder, it started off looking like this. Not dramatically different, just a little more updated.



Also on Friday, the rug was delivered. I immediately unrolled it to see how it looked in the space. I love the color and the pattern. Even the size is great. But the problem - it's VERY wooly and itchy feeling. Ok to walk on but not great for laying on with a baby. I did an impromptu survey of my new mom friends and they all seem to agree that you spend more time on the floor than you'd think - especially later when the baby is too wriggly to trust on the changing table. Sigh...I have to decide if I want to re-open the rug saga or just go with this one coupled with my small sheepskin throw rugs.


Next up, hubby helped me take the doors off the closet. We tried to figure out a way to hang some curtain hardware in the molding but everything I tried resulted in the curtain panel dangling a good 6-8" below the top of the closet (and creating a really unattractive view into the closet which is the opposite of what I want). We picked up a black tension rod that seems to have fixed this problem as I can mount it very close to the top of the door (but then of course the rings I had didn't fit on the new tension rod so I had to get all new rings). Also a problem, the curtain is 72" square and the closet opening is 67", leaving the resulting panel looking a bit skimpy. I decided I would make a trip to JoAnn Fabrics to see what they might have in the way of coordinating cottons that I could use to amend the panel. An hour later, I had 4 yards of a coordinating citrusy yellow Egyptian cotton (white was my first choice but...you guessed it...they didn't have enough yardage. Do you see a trend here? This is how the whole weekend went!). The plan is to add two 45" wide panels to either side of the existing curtain to create a new panel that is about 160" and hence nice and full. The whole thing will be hung on rings so sliding is easy and smooth.

The other thing giving my sewing machine a workout this weekend is the actual curtains for the room. The plan - hang double rod hardware to allow for a blackout curtain to be hung at the back and white cotton curtains to be hung at the front. This will let me move the blackouts independently and make the room dark for those afternoon naps without having to touch the "pretty" curtains. It's quite a lot of fabric (4 panels of each - blackout and white cotton) so we hung 4 support brackets. After getting them up though, I realized I would never be able to push the blackout curtains all the way out to the sides as I had intended without them getting hung up on the 2 middle support brackets. The best I could hope for would be to swag them to either side when I wanted them "open". This would not do.

A little brainstorming and we figured out that if we removed 1 of the support brackets and went with 3 total (2 on either side of the window and 1 right in the middle), I could hang all the panels in the resulting 2 spaces (left to middle and right to middle). But then another problem came up. The blackout curtains are being hung on clip rings while the white cotton curtains are on grommets. Because I am a crazy person, this bothered me. So I decided that I would cut the grommet piece off and create a new hem. Once I started that, I figured I might as well go the extra mile and sew the 4 panels into 2 so I wouldn't have any pesky spaces to deal with once the whole thing was up. I ripped open all the existing hems and pinned the 4 panels into 2 super panels (then I did the same thing for the blackout panels). They now sit patiently on my dining room table awaiting sewing. Oh and let's not forget that I'm still planning on prettying the white up with some grosgrain ribbon something like this.

Aaaand, it was 95+ again this weekend so guess who did no work on the yellow dresser sitting in the sweltering garage. Yup, me. Ugh. That thing haunts me, I swear.

So there you have it. Lots of projects started, but not a whole lot to show for our efforts just yet. The room looks like a bomb went off. But hopefully in 2 weeks things will look better. On the bright side, I found out my sconces are shipping this week (I ordered them 4 months ago!!!) and my yellow pouf is currently being shipped from Morocco so hopefully it will be on our porch when we return from our 4th of July travels!

I'm off to ponder rugs...again.