Please excuse my absence today, I’ve been working on finishing this up…

I’ve discovered that my threshold is 6 full sheets of stencil a day, which is 270 dots, which is what you see above. After that I lose steam and need to stop, even with Mike doing the aligning, taping and removal for me. This giant thing makes it hard for me to move in a small closet…

Tonight I even poured a tray of paint in my lap, while sitting on the floor, without even realizing it. So I did what any helpless person would do and screamed for my husband, who supplied me with paper towels, helped get me off the floor and washed my paint covered pants for me. Oh and I got paint all over my feet in the same incident and proceeded to walk around the nursery. It was wonderful.

So this is taking me a little longer than expected, but I am determined to finish it. I’m going to have to do a little less typing, a little more painting and hopefully I can finish it tomorrow. Stay tuned for more pictures and details!

You know how sometimes things have to look worse before they look better? That seems to be the case with our nursery progress as of this weekend.

(Sorry pictures are a little blurry today, it’s rainy out and I took them this morning before putting my contacts in. Whoops.)

We set out to conquer a bunch of things on our to-do list. Mostly, we were all set to make the closet pretty. We originally talked about our plans for the baby’s closet here. I know I’ve mentioned that I plan to stencil the closet, but I don’t think I’ve exactly explained the plan. It will be white polka dots.

So the majority of the mess in the nursery? Pieces of the closet system.

We started to put pieces together only to discover that we’re missing a screw… literally. Mike called Allen + Roth and they will be sending us a new piece, but it can take anywhere from 1-7 days. Whaaamp whaaamp. Slight setback, but that’s okay because the closet has to be stenciled first! Which brings us to clutter cause #2…

I got all ready to stencil on Sunday with the supplies that Cutting Edge Stencils so kindly sent me way back in December. The problem was that it took me so long to actually stencil and I left the stencil rolled in the shipping tube it came in. So it was way too curly to use and I had to let it sit for a few days.

Holding down the stencil are some books and a fan we picked up for the room this weekend. It seems to be working and is pretty flat at this point. Hopefully I can tackle that in the next day or so. Until then, the ottoman is home to directions for both the stencil and the closet system.

The crib has become a catch all for the storage bins that will eventually find a home in the closet.

But the good news is that we did get a lot done overall. Those two little outfits are all washed for the hospital. The dark gray one is my first choice (complete with gender specific hat and blanky) and the chevron one is a larger size incase I have a big baby. I decided to go with a gender neutral outfit because the baby is usually all blanket and hat in the beginning anyway and the gray looks so nice with both baby pink and blue 🙂

We also assembled most of our gear this weekend and it has found a home in the corner of the nursery.

We tucked this stuff in here because the last time we left something in the family room this happened…

Don’t worry, the bassinet pad hadn’t been washed yet. The stroller will be in the garage so Macky won’t get used to free rides… not that I pushed him around the family room in there or anything. Okay I did. I considered it quality control.

Finally, you may have noticed the giant elephant frame in the room. We made a trip to Ikea this weekend and picked up a frame for our alphabet print over the dresser.

I started my maternity leave today, so I’m hoping to wrap most of this stuff up this week. I probably won’t stick to my usual posting times, since well, I can post whenever I want now!! Though I’ll probably stick to weekdays since that’s when Mike works. I decided to take last night off after work so I could celebrate by sitting on the couch with a giant bowl of ice cream. It was fabulous 🙂