Making a Space for Moon

Now that the little guy is here, and everyone can know he's a boy, I can (finally) show off some of the more gender-revealing stuff (and other miscellaneous details) that we put together to get ready for him.

When we moved in here, we kept a room aside for the baby that we were hoping would come before too long. Impressively, we even managed to keep the room mostly empty while we waited. Then, once we were finally expecting the little one, we just had to give the room some character to get it ready!

Here it is before:

It was kind of funny, but with Townshend, I had all these great ideas for how to decorate early on. This time around, I felt stumped and had great trouble coming up with ideas.

So, to try to get things going, I started with the basics: room color. Since this baby was due in January, I knew the room would have to be painted while the weather was still warm enough to open windows. That meant that we picked the room color before we knew the gender. But gender is a silly way to pick a room color anyway; we went with another equally infallible supposition: Second kids are always more intense, more spirited, etc. So, we went with a nicely mellow blue.

It was amazing what a change of color did for the room; it felt like a space for living now rather than a room that was waiting. Also, with the color of the room, ideas for a general theme finally started coming in. If it was a girl baby, then I could add accents with birds and things like that. If it was a boy baby, I could use stars. As it happened, it was to be a boy baby, so stars it was!

First, a thrifted lamp:

It wasn't terrible to start, but it lacked the flavor I was going for. A little spray paint and some stamped-on stars later, it was much more interesting:

Next up, the closet. I failed to get a real Before picture (before I ripped out the lone wire shelf), but just imagine it was something mostly useless, very much like this one:

And, here it is post-demolition, pre-patching:

And finally, completed (with functionality):

Then I assembled a little night stand. In keeping with the color theme, we went with a white one but, of course, it needed some dressing up. So I switched out the knob for a cuter one and added some patterned contact paper.

Then, as with Townshend, I created a painting for the new little guy.  I still really like the thick texture of paint on canvas, so I used a palette knife to layer it on and swirl it around. Since stars was the theme, I used several different shades of blue (for space) and then topped it all off with stenciled stars of various sizes.

Here it is, waiting to dry:

Finally, Hubby (and my brother) assembled a big shelf from IKEA (this was the second go-round; turns out, when the instructions say two people needed, they really mean it!)

Now, after that little preview of the bits and pieces, here's a glimpse of the room all rightly assembled: