Picture of the Week: Madeleine at 3 months

 

Madeleine’s Closet Nursery

When we first moved into our place, we made sure to get an extra room.  Being able to host family and friends has always been very important to us, so a guest room was a must. We also thought that we could use this spare room as an office for the majority of the year where we don’t have guests. But at the back of our minds, we were also thinking that if we had a baby, we would most definitely require an extra room.  Over the past couple of years, we’ve enjoyed many seeing many guests come and go, and I also ended up working a full time job from home, so the extra room was definitely a smart move.

Then, when we found out that we were expecting a baby, we realised we wanted to keep our spare room as an guest room/office, rather than convert it into a nursery. It is with this thought that J and I both separately had the same brain wave: Why not convert our walk-in closet into a nursery for our soon-to-be baby?

We started working on the nursery-closet (now known as Madeleine’s room) back in April before we left for Toronto for a few months. This is what it looked like before we started:

As you can see, it was in pretty rough shape.

At the time, J was finishing up his exams, so this project was basically mine. I started by sanding down all the peeling paint, and then continued by filling up the cracks with “crack fill”.  I then painted the top of the wall (above the shelves) a pale yellow, which I thought would be a perfect colour for a baby room, but would also work well as a closet colour for anyone using this space after us.

Here is how it looked after the sanding, filling and painting:

The next step was to put up some white wood paneling which we picked up from Home Depot (Side note: I never realised how much I could learn from chatting with people working in hardware stores. I knew absolutely nothing before starting this project, and learned so much just by asking questions to the people who worked at Home Depot and Home Hardware. Who knew!). By this point, J was finished with his exams and was able  to join me – thankfully 🙂

Here’s how the room looked after all the paneling was put up:

And here is how it looks now:

We were super blessed to have M’s curtains sewn by my friend Emma, over at Emma Poliquin Photography (whose pictures I highly recommend you check out!). We picked up the dresser at Wicker Emporium, and it worked perfectly as a dresser/change table. Overall, we are super happy with the space! It is a perfect size for a little baby, and it is also very convenient to have M so close by during the night, while still allowing her to have her “own room”.  The only downside of course, was that we had to sacrifice our closet space, but we were able to be a bit creative with storage for our clothes, and in the end it all worked out 🙂 We are pretty proud of ourselves for turning our 2 bedroom place into a 3 bedroom place!