Nursery-Labor of Love: Part 2

Thanks for tuning in again to read more about our nursery project :).  You may remember from yesterday's post (which was the first in our nursery series, make sure to check if out if you have not yet as each post builds on the last) that we mentioned our nursery being a small room.  This is the smallest of the 3 bedrooms in our house but we love this room and felt that it was cozy and could be transformed into a great space for a baby.  On another note, our home is over 100 years old and although many updates have been made to it over the years, we want to make sure any permanent furniture we add or build into the house feels like it has always been there.  We LOVE old homes because of all the extra details that were built into them originally, the lovely woodwork, and even though many times they are imperfect because of their age.....a lot of times those imperfections are what makes them special and unique. 

Today we are going look at the biggest 'construction' project that we have done while working on the nursery. This room did not have any storage whatsoever.  It also has a slight pitch to the ceiling so we decided to build in bookcases and a window seat on the wall where the window is located.  This would give us a lot of storage both under the window seat for toys and storage for books and photos in the bookcases.  We also wanted to make sure that this permanent fixture looked like it had always been there and that it give the room a false sense of height hiding some of the pitch in the ceiling.  There are going to be A LOT of pics in this post because you can really see the progression through the photos.  We hope you enjoy.






Here is a refresher of what the room looked like before we started.  This is pre-paint as well.  This picture is looking from the doorway into the room. 

First step-removing baseboards (notice we used painting tape to mark off the overall size of the built in on the floor.  This helped us visualize whether or not what we where thinking was going to be too dominating in the room). 

Most of this built in was started in the garage and built in pieces, then assembled and installed in the house.  This gave us more room to work and was less of a mess.

Here is the window seat going in.  This was built in two sections and then assembled together in the room. 

You will see we used wainscoting as the backing of this built in. We like wainscoting's clean and simple lines.  This is also something that is easy to wipe off and clean later.  The 6 cubbies under the window seat will have baskets for toys.  This was a great way for us to maximize storage in this room while still looking clean and uncluttered. 

Here it is pre-paint with most of the trim work completed.  You will see we were able to salvage the original baseboards that were on the wall under the window and we moved them to the front of this unit so all baseboards in the room match perfectly.

Here it is mostly painted.  I know these pictures make the piece look very sterile but because we have gray walls we wanted to make sure this piece brightened up the room.  The book shelves are not installed in these pics but you will see more of that in later posts. 

In our next posts you will see how we started bringing more color and fabric into the room.  We hope you enjoyed seeing the progression of this built in being installed.  A huge amount of credit for this project goes to Michael as I have not been able to do the heavy lifting and painting because I'm pregnant but I did some sanding and wood putty when ever I could.  I just LOVE the way this turned out.  It surprisingly does not make this room look smaller.  It has created a more visually appealing space and it will be SO useful over the years. 

P.S,  Building built in's into a 100+ year old home does not come without it's challenges as NOTHING in the house is 'sqaure'.  This lead to many head scratching moments when working on this project.