Nursery-Labor of Love: Part 3

Welcome back everyone!  Good to see you here again today.  I have to admit.......we are really excited to show you more of our projects and today we had a hard time deciding where to take you next.  Finally, we decided to show you a super fun accent piece which is also a burst of color in our nursery (just in case you were starting to think we were boring with all the gray and white :)). 

First off, I wanted to give you a sneak peak of the fabrics we are using in the room to help you better understand this next project.  Picking fabrics was quite difficult at first.  We had a pretty clear vision of what we wanted in our head.....but finding it proved to be a challenge.  We did a lot of searching online as well as in stores here in the DesMoines area but ended up finding our fabric (thanks to my mom) at an awesome fabric store outside of Garner, Ia called Country Threads.  Garner is very close to my hometown of Britt, Ia where I was born and raised.  I have passed this store thousands of times over the years but never stopped.  The store is located on a farmstead right off Highway 18 west of Garner and the store is in an old chicken coup, so cute!  My mom went shopping with Michael and I one weekend we were home and said we had to stop there because she said we would LOVE it and had a feeling we would find something we liked.  She was right!

The thing I love about this shop is that it is organized in color schemes making it easier to shop when you are on a mission.  We gravitated toward the mustard yellow color were were envisioning and 'wala' found our fabrics.  Michael and I agreed on them immediately and immediately purchased the needed amounts :).  I like accent pieces in odd numbers....because of this, I knew that I wanted 3 different fabrics represented in the room.  We ended up choosing 2 patterned fabrics and one plain gray fabric that matches the walls almost perfectly.  You can view the patterned fabric swatches below.  We will take a look at what we have made out of these fabrics in later posts.

I had mentioned in our first post that we wanted a room that had a vintage/shabby chic feel.  These patterns fit that vision perfectly.  We love the 'naturey' feel they have (I think I may have just made that word 'naturey' up....but you get what I mean right?) :).  We also like that they are not 'baby yellow'.  That was a color we wanted to avoid as we didn't feel it fit the look we were trying to achieve. 


Ok Ok Ok, onto the ACTUAL project we are going to look at today. As most of you know, baby furniture is so expensive.  Because of this, we wanted to figure out a way to bring a smaller dresser into the room that we could use for both a changing table and clothing storage.  We wanted to use the top as a changing table at first then simply as a dresser later.  We also wanted this piece to be YELLOW :).  We thought this would be such a fun pop of color in the room.  Naturally, this would be completely impossible to find in a store or way over our budget so we decided to make one on our own.  Check out the photo's below......

Check out this beauty!  This was found at a yard sale for $40.00.  It's old, sturdy, and has some great antique lines, and best of all...... it was affordable...everything we were hoping for!

It's re-finishing time!

If you ever do a project like this, make sure to have extra sand paper because I was burning through it on this project.  I used a hand held electric sander for the large flat surfaces and 'hand sanded' the intricate parts of the dresser.

Wala!  Isn't this cute?!

With a little paint and new vintage inspired hardware we have an awesome and useful accent piece.  This was so much fun to do and again brings a lot of visual interest to this room.  It is one of my very favorite pieces in the nursery!  We brought our fabric swatches to Menard's and they were able to match the yellow in the fabric to the make the perfect paint color. 

We hope you had enjoyed seeing our dresser/changing table come to life today! :)