your room
You will soon come to know that I love to decorate and I can go a little overboard sometimes, but I’m really happy with how your room turned out. I hope it’ll be a fun space for you in your early years!
Your dad and I like too many things and there are too many cool bears (Paddington, Pooh, Smokey) and that’s not even accounting for anything else, so we just decided to make the theme colorful childhood.
planning
I started collecting things for your nursery pretty much as soon as we found out you were coming.
The crib was the first thing we got, off Facebook Marketplace for $100. Then, I started collecting frames and things for your gallery wall (way too many of both). Once I actually sat down to plan the wall (see the near finished layout above) I had about double the stuff I had room for. Not quite sure how big I thought the wall was.
I also got just about every Behr swatch imaginable from Home Depot (I used some of them to make the marmalade piece in the gallery wall) and swapped some out about 4 times before finally deciding. As you can see from the early mood board, I was planning on painting the paneling light blue but decided against it because the doors are light blue (and too bright of a shade to paint that big of a space) and I REALLY did not want to paint the doors. So we pivoted to yellow and I love it.
I originally wanted to do wallpaper on the wall above the paneling, but when I priced anything I liked out, it was about $1000 for half the wall in your tiny little room so I decided I could paint stripes myself, and I did. I wanted them to be evenly spaced but organic, so I decided on a color order, drew the lines on the wall measured out with pencil and marked which colors went where, and painted the stripes on like a color-by-number while listening to the Narnia books. It took way longer than I thought (some of the colors took 3 coats) and it was a trust-the-process type situation but I’m happy with how it turned out.
I had a lot of help throughout the process, too!
Your Grandpa came up and spent the whole day putting up paneling and trim (never as easy as it looks). Your Dad and Kavita helped paint the paneling yellow a few weeks later (I had the Oregon trip and lotssssss of filling to do on the wood so that was a bit delayed). Your Dad helped me hang stuff and Dad and Grandpa hung up blinds after I took them down to put up ones I tried to DIY that…did not work. Lol.
Lots of your honorary aunts and uncles consulted on the process and a few of them made things for you! Caroline cross-stiched your Paddington tag, my boss Hannah made your “Lil Hendo” pennant, your Sweet Mama got you your first Braves hat that’s on the shelf, your Great Grandma and Great Aunt Dawn got your rocking chair, Aunt Kaitlyn got your little duck with glasses, and so many friends and family got books and toys to fill the space.
Last-minute, I decided to make the alphabet piece above the rocking chair. The backing fabric is from your Great-Grandma’s couch that was at least 40 years old when your Dad and I couldn’t take it anymore and got rid of it (it was well past its prime). I cut the back fabric out before we got took it down to the street and this seemed like the perfect place to use it. You’ll never get to know my Grandma and Papa, but I bet if we take this out of the frame sometime you’ll be able to smell their house.
You can see the final state of the room before you were born below! I’d like to think it will be similar to how you’ll come to remember it, but who knows what I’ll change by then!
