In case you're having trouble figuring out that title, it's supposed to be "nautical" with "knot" inserted. :)
Thomas is 3 and half weeks old and I've finally finished his nursery! (Update: He's four and half weeks old now. It's taken me over a week to get this written...) Or at least finished it for now. I'm so pleased with how it turned out, especially since I really had no idea what I wanted or where I was going with it. Ready for some pics?
Here is my first-ever panoramic iphone photo. Hopefully it'll help you visualize the layout of everything.
Ok, now let's back up a second and talk about where this room is in our house. Our house has four bedrooms but with Matt and me in one, Katie Wynn in one, and Anna and Wyatt each having their own room, we were fresh outta rooms. The only room left was our "office" that had held nothing but junk since we moved in. There are some less-than-ideal things about it - like it's right at the front door, across from the dining room, and has double french doors - but I still felt like we could make it work as a bedroom.
We added curtains to the double french doors to block the view and light a little bit and to hopefully make it feel more like a bedroom inside. As of right now, we have been leaving the door on the right closed and just using the left one, again to make it feel more like a bedroom.
The door's open, so let's go on inside! Directly across from the double french doors is the crib. Above it is the school of fish I already told you about. I've already caught Thomas eyeing them during his brief stints in his crib.
The crib bedding is all out of Benartex Home's Coastal Living collection (except for the cream minky dot) and was handmade by my mom. She did an awesome job on it!! This fabric was probably the splurge for the room (other than the custom built-ins) but I ended up getting a great deal on it. One piece in the collection is a patchwork of all the other pieces and sold for $53 a yard at the store I found it in. Yikes, too rich for my blood!! I ended up finding that same piece of patchwork fabric online at a clearance price of $9 a yard. Awww yeah, that's more like it!
Mom used the patchwork fabric to make an adjustable crib skirt. It's adjustable so that it can "kiss the floor" when the crib is at any of its three levels. She trimmed it out in the same stripe that she used on the outside of the bumper pads.
The inside of the bumper pads is a soft cream minky dot that is an exact match to the cream zip sheet on the mattress. (If you have a child (or two) sleeping in a crib with bumpers and you aren't using zip sheets, you need to stop what you're doing and purchase some now! They make changing the sheets SO much easier!) We bought and cut our own foam for the bumper pads so it's two inches thick and pretty much stands up on its own. The piping is done out of another coordinating stripe and Mom also made a small minky dot blanket out of her leftover fabric.
The bumper ties were the holdup on calling the nursery complete because I was dragging my feet on getting them sewn on! I hate hand-sewing but I finally knocked it out and love the way they turned out. I used a white cording rope and tied sailor knots (Carrick Bend, to be exact) instead of the usual bow to go along with the "knot-ical" theme.
To the right of the crib is the set of hanging shelves we made. Below them is still an empty space - this is where a toy box or small book shelf will eventually be added.
I saw lots of different versions of rope shelves on Pinterest. I just took the parts I liked of each one and mashed them together to make our version. The shelves are each anchored to the wall so the rope and knots are more cosmetic than functional. The rope is wrapped around boat cleats that are majorly secured to the wall. (Matt said they are on there so good that if we ever have a tornado we should ditch the closet and just hang on to the boat cleats!)
The shelves are full of nautical-ish decorations. I can't wait to get his newborn pictures back so I can fill up the empty picture frames in his room!
Below is the view from standing in front of those shelves and looking back to the other side of the room.
We have been steadily filling up the closets with little boy clothes. I'm still adjusting to having so much blue mixed in with our pink laundry!
Everything in the built-ins nook except for the wooden fish was a Homegoods find. I LOVE the mirror and how it looks hanging there! It does a good job of bouncing the natural light from the windows around the room so it's always nice and bright in here.
Now, here's the view of the other side of the room from standing right in front of that mirror.
The changing table that I found at Bargain Hunt for a whopping $25 sits in between the two windows. I love how much it cost but I still don't love the way it looks. I added four Homegoods baskets but it seems like no matter how organized I keep the baskets, it always looks messy to me. Oh well, it's just til he's potty trained, right?!
But right above the changing table is one of my very favorite things in the room - the shadowbox of knots! Matt and I looked up different boating knots and tied all of these ourselves. I had a friend frame it and she included small plaques with the names of each knot underneath it. It was really hard to get a good picture of it because of the glares so you'll just have to come see it in person.
I think what I love most about this is that nothing about it screams little boy. I can see this hanging in Thomas's office someday when he's big and grown!
To the right of the changing table is this cozy corner where I've already fed my boy bottles and rocked him to sleep. The chair is one that we already had that we had recovered and added a swivel glider base to the bottom of so that it would rock. The ottoman is a storage cube that we had too.
The floor lamp is one that we already had; it's from Target and used to live in the living room.
Mom made the throw pillow that sits in the chair and it's reversible. Gotta love having options! One side is the patchwork fabric like the crib skirt and the other side is the stripe on the bumper pads.
I love the wicker whale shelf that we found at Homegoods but I'll admit, I've had a hard time finding things small enough to fit in the uniquely shaped openings! I'm sure these will all change as Thomas acquires more things.
Here's another view of that side of the room where you can see the french doors. Above them hangs an oar!
You may have already noticed but on both the window treatments and the french door coverings, we used industrial piping instead of traditional curtain rods and hardware. We pieced together galvanized pipes, elbows, and phalanges to make rods for the curtains to hang on.
On the french doors, we added a "belt" to the middle of the curtains so we can still peek through the windows. I'm sure as he gets older we'll end up removing these so he can have more privacy, but for now I like being able to see in.
And you know we had to tie those "belts" in with the theme of the room, so we added sailor knots to them too.
Our cleaning lady got to watch the room come together when she came by every other week. She surprised us the week Thomas was born with this little sailor outfit that she had made for him. Can you believe she made that!? She's got skills.
So that's the grand tour of our knot-ical nursery. I hope you enjoyed it! I'll keep you posted when our little sailor actually starts sleeping in it. :)