Put Up Your Dukes: nursery finale...finally!

UPDATED: i added some professional pictures of the nursery that were taken when we had one of layla's sessions at our house. these new snapshots can be found at the bottom of the post and are all by the wonderful brenna. find her here.

this whole time i had been thinking that i had posted the progress of layla's room up to a pretty recent degree. i thought we were on the same page and the only things you hadn't seen yet were the last few things that i hadn't done yet. then i went back and found my last update, and i realized how bad i left y'all hanging. there was practically nothing finished when last i reported in.

i'm about to make it right. i can't give you back all the hours of sleep you missed while gnashing your teeth waiting for the big reveal (am i overestimating your degree of care?) , but i can give you pictures of her room. her completed room. with responsible linkage for everything we used (anything i left off can probably be found in the previous room update post i linked to above), not that i think you want to copy me or anything, but so you can judge me when you see the prices of all this stuff. don't act like you dont do that. i so do.

it's important that you know that i didn't come up with ANY of this. i completely ripped off inspiration from an ohdeedoh nursery tour. 100% ripped, give that mom all the credit. i have said before, but in case you are an anti-link clicker, and don't want to go read the backstory to the room, i have NO STYLE instincts of my own. if i had thought this room up on my own, we would have ended up with some unholy lisa frank meets glitter factory explosion of puketastic proportions.

but the interweb intervened and here we are. i give you my favorite room in the house:

the view when you enter. minus one toothless little poppinjay cheesing it up like a little jailbird about to be set free.

guess who loves to "pick flowers" now that she can stand up? yeah. any given morning there are 3 or 4 of these little blossoms in bed with our lay-lay

closet and entry door caught in the blossom cyclone that is breezing through the room

triage station

and over to the rocking nook

SO. there are still some little additions i want/need to make, like a pillow for the chair and a few more wall pieces, but i think this is 95% the way it all will stay.

let's hit some details:

ordered 3 pom-poms from pomtastic on etsy. loved fluffing them and adding them here to take up a nice amount of vertical space and add more pops of color. i didnt get the trend at first, but now i am a pom-believer.

the "rise and shine" print i fell hard for when i found it in the keep calm gallery. i tried to make my own version to save money, but kinko's kept jacking up the color and font so i nixed that and bought the real one. i LOVE that it's a cheery morning message, but also a jesus-y call to rise up and shine in the world.

found the hamper at walmart in the perfect shade of boysenberry. this corner will be where i add some stuff. like probably a few more prints on the right wall next to and around the 8x10 one there.

i got this print from twig creative on sale due to an irregularity that the frame covers up. i'm going to be honest when i say i didn't "get" it until it arrived at my house and i looked at it long and hard. it says "love out loud" and the colors were just right, but i couldn't figure out what the weird outlines around the big LOVE were. then i saw it: it's the word LOVE written in white inside the colorful word LOUD. nice. and perfect since layla is both love and loud.

the completed mobile i made. looks like a naughty judah-monkey broke in and batted at the balls since they seem a bit tangled. little truant! still loving the screen prints and their messages to layla from us and from jesus.

THE piece de resistance. did it cost more than most of the furniture in the room? yes. oh, but it's everything, you guys. it really does make the room, i think. and, as you know, i got 40% off through a friend and we had extra money in our baby fund because we got so many hand me downs and didnt have to buy a lot for layla. enough excuses. it's perfect. find it here.

our photographer's sweet assistant was laying on it helping to test the lighting and one of her bobby pins got stuck to the rug. i had a small heart attack and then freed her from it with only the tiniest loop pulled out a bit. thank goodness she didn't hop right up.

the expedit cube. we bought it when we first got married and i painted the front and perimeter with the same martha stewart grey paint that we used on the crib. the interior is still black-brown.

this one was tough to decorate. the open cubes cant really do a lot of practical storage and still look good and pulled together (stacks of onesies aren't quite the look i am going for), so i took my friend raechel's advice and put our more pretty toys in there and then added big books in the back to add height. we might get a few more door/drawer white inserts if we need more practical, out of sight storage.

i love her crib. everything else in the room is so colorful to play off of the charcoal walls, that the calm, neutral crib and bedding just stands out with quiet dignity. an oasis of serenity. hahaha. totally joking. i do not take this stuff that seriously. it just looks freaking cool!

these are the exact fabrics that the inspiration room used for her bumpers and skirt. i made the skirt last weekend after putting it off forever, but my procrastination paid off because the skirt's fabric finally came back in stock after being sold out all the other times i had looked for it. i had already settled on a not-nearly-as-cool other fabric when i saw the original allstar was available again. i only made half of the skirt because you'll never see the sides that are against the wall under the bed. dont judge, you know that junk is dope.

per another great idea by raechel (seriously, nothing is my own idea), i added a mirror over the changing pad for layla to look at while we change her. it's actually 3 rounded-square panels from ikea (4 for $5...judah got the leftover one for his changing table). layla loves it so far. i, however, forgot it was there and took these tour pictures while naturally pants-and-bra-less, hence the image-scrubbing that looks like a little stormcloud on the mirror. you do NOT want that storm to blow over, trust me.

the basket was the holder for an awesome baby welcome gift from our church. it was a pale baby pink that i didnt love but was so useful for wipes, diapers and medicine storage that i had to keep it. so we spray painted it avocado. good baskets are not cheap and are so very useful so i am glad this little gem can stay forever.

ditto on the flower lamp. it's from ikea and was a monochrome baby pink (check it) that was not doing it for me, but i loved the price, shape and utility, so i taped it off and painted the center gold and then the petals a deeper pink. i had painted it blue initially, but didnt like it, so now when you turn on the lamp in the dark you can see that a much darker color is under the pink and it casts a weird dark purple light. but it looks cool with the lights on at least.

another sneak peek our photographer gave us from layla's session. you can see the layout of the little mirrors better here. SO wish i had windexed better so the finger smudges didnt look like i applied foundation with a basting brush. also this picture makes me insane with love.

i am kind of nervous because everyone was so excited and encouraging about our first steps decorating this room. i hope it lived up to the hype. i absolutely adore this room and might need to recreate it wherever we live in the future.

sorry it took 7 months before we were ready to house you perfectly, layla-boo. i hope you'll think you room is/was cool one day when you see these. p.s. please stop pulling things off the wall.

some professional shots of the room and its details:

seriously? i have fallen hard

my favorite corner of the room. and the occupant who deserves such cuteness.

black white and grey crib and walls looking cool in a black and white photo. tasting good too.

word.

the ultimate cat toy. layla has since snatched some of these down and they are just a tangledy mess that i may never get around to fixing. so glad they live on in the pictures.