A Room With A View

One of the most exciting, enjoyable and 'this sh*# is for real' parts of preparing for Baby Britz's arrival has been getting the nursery ready. The room in the house we chose for this was one that had been storing a daybed, the treadmill and some other odds and ends. There was little to no organization to the room and the previous owners of the house had painted it a horrid deep green for some unknown reason. It was so dark, I had to prime it twice!!

The first thing we did was take out the daybed out and it is now stored in the attic and garage. Next we got the treadmill out and it is being stored (and used more than it ever was) at the in-laws in Raleigh. Thanks to Tom and Sandy for helping out with this and I am glad it is being used. After that we got all the other random crap that accumulated in the room and closet out so we could start painting.

If you read some of the earlier entries, you know we are not finding out the gender of the baby prior to its arrival so we had to pick some gender neutral colors to paint the room. After my idea of painting the room to look like the outfield of Citizens Bank Park (home of the five-time NL East champions and soon to be 2011 World Series champions Philadelphia Phillies), we decided on a nice beige for the base color and then painted a stripe of mint green and stripe of a butter yellow. It does not get much more gender neutral than that!!! A special thanks to Brian Davis who helped prime and paint the base color on his short visit here from Texas in July! And yes, this has been a several month project, but it turned out awesome!!!

We then decided to go with animals (mainly animals from Australia) for the theme. I wanted to do a shark them, but again was outvoted 1-1. I have to be honest, this whole theme thing for a baby's room is the biggest scam ever. There is no way this kid will have any clue what the hell is on the walls, in the crib, on the shelves, etc., for about two years. But we as parents feel the need to make everything perfect for our own peace of mind so we drop a bunch of money and pretend to be on those home improvement shows. Shoot, the baby probably won't even sleep in the room for the first 4-5 months! But I digress...we had some stuffed animals that were koalas and kangaroos and then some standard teddy bears, but we really had nothing for the walls. After much discussion and stopping by a few stores, we found these wood animal figures of tigers, lions, giraffes, elephants and one monkey that are about three inches high at Hobby Lobby. In what is probably the cheapest and lamest interior decoration effort ever, we bought several of them and just taped them on the wall in between the two stripes. Amazingly enough, they look great...they add just the right amount of color and they go very nicely with the theme. In the near future, some shelves will be added and then maybe the name over the crib once the baby arrives.

Somewhere in between all this we did purchase a nice crib and dresser. We also just bought a glider and ottoman and the I am still lobbying for the 50" flat screen for the wall. I will leave it on the Animal Planet channel so as to not disrupt the theme!! We also got a new closet organizer and installed it in one afternoon. I have to admit I am pretty proud of myself for doing all this without professional help because I am not what you would call a handy man. To be fair, Joanna did help quite a bit with everything but the painting for obvious reasons.

I will say once we got the crib put together (hopefully well enough to support the baby) and it was just sitting there glaring at me, it really hit home that this was happening. I am very excited to put Baby Britz in the crib and stand there watching him or her sleep. At the same time, it is very frightening to think this kid has to rely on me and Joanna for EVERYTHING. I have no idea what kind of dad I will be, but putting the nursery together has given me hope that I am not a complete moron when it comes to fixing up stuff around the house. Who knows, maybe the kid will even be impressed by this at some point. Until next time...