Working on the Nursery

 OK, so last time I showed you what we started with in our third bedroom that would eventually become the baby’s room. At some point in the three years before we actually started working on this room, we tore out the beer fridge and the damaged drywall behind it.

Underneath the plaster wall was just absolutely crumbling, and it stayed covered up under a curtain until this summer when we started working on the room again.
In that shot you can also see how stained the ceiling was – the roof was only about two years old when we bought the house and obviously had been leaking because there were stains all over the office ceiling.

Apparently it had also been leaking into the eaves, because the lovely cork stretch above the paneling started literally falling down onto my desk over the last couple of years. I would sit down at the desk to edit pictures and crumbled chunks of plaster would be all over my keyboard. This is what it looked like before we put drywall over this whole area.

Not exactly safe for a baby, especially because this wall was the only one that was long enough for any kind of crib or cradle in the room. And I definitely did not want to see my baby covered in plaster chunks like my keyboard! :-)

And then of course the little builtin desk area across the room was still full of cork too, which had been glued onto plywood, which was nailed over the plaster. We tried a variety of ideas to get the cork off the plywood cleanly so we could just paint the plywood, but it was not to be.

We had to tear out the shelves, cork and plywood and repair the plaster wall underneath. Talk about a labor of love for this little baby!
So, we began the tedious process of demolition, putting up drywall, finishing the drywall and painting all of the drywall, paneling, the ceiling, trimwork and the closet. I didn’t take any pictures of this process because I was seven months pregnant and we were just trying to get things finished before the baby popped out, but so many people offered to help us – my friend Yesi let us borrow her SUV to buy the drywall, Jon and Steph came over one evening to help us prime everything, and then Steph came back another evening to help me paint the paneling. They were ridiculously helpful, and I made sure to provide lots of entertainment with my increasingly paint covered baby bump getting in the way. :-)

I spent an evening on the floor removing paint drips and splatters from all over the floor. Apparently the previous owners knew they were putting in carpet, so when painting they just went all willy-nilly with their brushes without regard for the floor. So I spent several hours scraping, pulling out rogue staples, and then cleaning and buffing the floor. The end result isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better than where we started. But let me tell you, doing that while 7ish months pregnant - boy was I sore the next day! 

We also installed a light in the ceiling, so that there weren't just random wires hanging down as a fire hazard for the baby.  This light box isn't hooked up to a switch, so there's just a pull chain for it. I was worried about the functionality of that with a baby, but it hasn't been a problem. In this shot you can also see that we painted the ceiling. Some Kilz primer and flat ceiling paint and it was as good as new! :-) 

Next up, the after pictures!