A few months ago during a random trip to Lowe’s, we picked up some hooks for our laundry room.  We needed some space to hang random bags, jackets and so forth when we walk in from the garage.  We planned on lining them straight on a specific wall. But it turned out the wall had some duct work inside of it and the configuration we wanted would not work.  We ended up going with something different which left us with a handful of hooks.

Those hooks sat there for months until we faced the same dilemma in Easton’s room.  His room layout is a rectangle but the closet sticks out as you walk into the room leaving a space that is rather dead.  We wanted to utilize this area to hang random items; quite like the laundry room idea.  We went through some ideas from just mounting the hooks directly to the wall to buying one of those pre-made pieces of wood with hooks on them.

Both ideas just seemed lacking.  Random silver hooks on the wall?  Could work, but it just seemed too plain.  The pre-made idea would work, but we wanted something to really tie into the rest of the room.

The wall behind E’s crib is paneled and all white.  Why not extend this idea to the area when you walk into his room?  After all, I had a ton of wood left over since, well, I can’t measure (but that’s a story for another day).

So I ventured out to cut two straight pieces in order to make a joint in the corner.  From there it was some paint and attach the hooks.

Neither one of us were really sold on the hooks within E’s room.  We love the metal, of course, but the size feels a bit on the larger side.  Did we need to go so big?  I’m not sure; probably because his stuff is so tiny.  I’m sure with a couple of years and book-bags, sports gear and so forth, we’ll be looking to add even more hooks.  So perhaps these hooks will be just fine as Easton grows.

It was such a simple project that added functionality to an area of the room that otherwise would be useless (besides an opening for the door to swing, duh).  And plus, super cheap.  Left over wood from a previous project + left over white paint + roughly $10 for the hooks ($2.50 x 4).

Note to self: change those damn gold door knobs and hinges. 

I last left you with our nursery closet looking like this, after being stenciled and installing an organization system…

Well, now that you know that we had a baby boy, I can share the closet all stocked with his adorable things.

We still have plenty of room to fill up with things. The top left side of the closet is sparse because that was home to his newborn sized clothes, which he is currently wearing. Since our upstairs AC broke last week, we’ve been living out of the pack & play downstairs, so all of his current clothes are in there.

I doubted the green paint for a while, but now that I see it with the bedding and the chevron curtains, I love it. The bedding is DwellStudio for Target’s Space collection, which I got on clearance and is sadly no longer available.

Right now, Easton has tons of 0-3 month and 3-6 month clothes, so those sections are stocked.

All of his pajamas, blankets and basics are in his dresser. I admit that those 2 baskets in the center tower of the closet system are currently empty. We have plenty of room to grow, so I didn’t bother decorating much there. Though we did have to include one staple that we picked up…

We’ve been debating whether or not to hang this bat somewhere or let it live on a shelf. For now, it’s just living on a shelf. Who knows where it will end up in the future. We’re still working on some wall art and I’ve been trying to devote some time to going outside to spray paint, so that we can finally hang the alphabet art I slaved over before Easton was born. Though when given the option to sleep, shower or spray paint, sleep has been winning. Where are my priorities? 🙂

During the past week or so, Mike and I have been busy chipping away at nursery projects. So busy, in fact, that we have way more to blog about than we have left to do. It’s so amazing and exciting to see the room come together and I am itching to share everything. Right now, we’ve been focusing on getting everything done before the little one is here. With each extra day we get comes a new opportunity to tackle some projects.

Right around the time Mike finished installing the giraffe sconces, the missing closet piece arrived. They sent us an entire new panel for the screw/bolt part we needed. In case you need a refresher, we bought an Allen + Roth premium wood closet system from Lowe’s.

(via Lowe’s)

We have a similar version in our master closet and love it. In our old place, we used some inexpensive Closetmaid organizers that ended up falling apart on us. Like, I literally pulled open a drawer one day and the entire front came unglued. Since then we stick to the solid wood products from Lowe’s. We can cut the shelves down to whatever size we need and customize all of the configurations.

Mike got to putting together the center tower right away. Then, being the rocket scientists we are, we had to figure out how to get the tall tower into the actual closet.

It took a few tilts and laughs, but we got it in.

By we, I mean Mike. I pretty much sat in the glider through the whole process, snapping pictures with my iPhone.

Please note the white paint all over my pajama pants. They were the victim of the spilled tray of paint while I stenciled the closet.

After we got the tower in, we went back to Lowe’s to pick up some shelves. We needed 25 inch wide shelves on each side. The shelves came in 21″, 48″ or 72″. None of those options were ideal. We literally scratched our heads in Lowe’s forever trying to figure out how we can pull this all off. Another problem was that the clothing rods Lowe’s sold were too large. We checked some of their other brands and saw some expandable rods that were 24″-36″, but they were in white. To save some money, we decided to only get one of the 72″ shelves and just do shelves over the top rod of the closet. We went to Home Depot to see if they had any chrome rods that would fit the 25″ we needed. Thankfully they did!

We got home and Mike cut 2 shelves to 25″. He installed them with some brackets, anchoring them to two walls and the tower. Just below each shelf, we put a clothing rod.

To gauge where we wanted to put the next level of rods, we grabbed one of Mike’s shirts for some scale (since baby clothes are so tiny).

Then we decided something. Since baby clothes are so small, we decided we DID want to do that second level of shelves. We knew it would look better and give us a place to put little shoes and stuff. We know for an adult a shelf might not be practical, but it can always be removed.

Back to Lowe’s Mike went for another 72″ shelf! He repeated the shelf and rod process on the lower level and we were almost done!

Next, the drawers went in… we decided to get 3. The bottom of the tower can be left as shelves, drawers, metal baskets or a shoe rack. We were going to do just 2 drawers but then decided that the closed storage is more versatile.

We went with the flat front panel, but Lowe’s also sells a more traditional, beveled drawer front. Oh and for the tower? They give you both a straight top piece and a curved one. This baffled both of us for a while because we wanted the straight piece but all of the boxes had the curved piece on the picture. We didn’t realize it came with both options, pretty clever.

We also decided to stick with the hardware that came with the drawers. Why not? We like it. Maybe down the road we’ll go for something more custom, but it’s perfectly fine with me right now.

I couldn’t back up to take better pictures because there was a lot of furniture in the way behind me (we were working on hanging curtains on the same day, so things were shifted).

I almost forgot to include a picture with the shelves in the tower! I didn’t realize that the zoomed out pictures were taken before we put them in, so here they are!

Of course, it took me about 2 minutes to run to the spare bedroom and grab all of the baby’s clothes that have been living in there since we started this. The closet was stocked about 5 minutes later 🙂 I put newborn clothes on one rod, 0-3 months on another, 3-6 months on the next rod and 6-12 months on the last rod. It’s pretty amazing to be nice and organized. In the drawers right now are smaller odds and ends, though the drawers are amazingly deep and have a nice little self closing feature. I fit an entire breast pump (still in the box) along with a bunch of accessories and a nursing cover in one of the drawers. The top shelves are home to some baskets and the tower is currently holding Boppys, a basket and some little decorative items.

The bookcase has arrived and I painted the back of it green, only to have the paint not stick at all, so Mike had to coat it with a layer of primer for me (since it wasn’t no-VOC). He finished that tonight so hopefully the next layer of green I put on actually works! I also made some chevron curtains, a bed skirt, made the crib, decorated the changing area and designed some ABC art in Photoshop. Once this baby actually comes, I can share some real after pictures!

Around the holidays, Cutting Edge Stencils contacted me and asked if I would be interested in reviewing one of their stencils. Since I was already a fan and own one of their stencils, of course I said yes! Problem was that we hadn’t yet started the nursery and I wanted to stencil the ceiling. Thankfully, they told me I could hold off on my review until I was ready and I chose their Polka Dot Allover Stencil in the small scale size.

Fast forward like, 5 months. We ended up taking much longer than expected on the nursery and after painting the ceiling a dreamy blue, I decided that I didn’t want to stencil it. I focused my stencil attention on the green closet instead.

It took us a while after we painted to get to the closet, but this week I was finally able to spend some time on stenciling. Cutting Edge Stencils sent me everything I could possibly need to tackle this…. the stencil, a foam roller, a brush and a level.

The stencil also came with detailed directions, which is how I realized that I was supposed to remove the stencil from the shipping tube immediately and store it flat. Whoops. But, like I said the other day, I flattened it with some books for a day or two and it was fine.

The directions stated that you could use spray adhesive to stick the stencil to the wall. Since I started this at night and didn’t really have an open space to spray it, I decided to just use Frog Tape to stick my stencil to the wall. Please excuse the mixture of night time, day time and iPhone pictures for these in-progress shots. I had to work on this over 3 days in small increments because you know, I’m kinda really pregnant at this point 🙂

Yeah I taped the heck out of that first stencil. Since I started in the bottom corner of the closet, I decided not to use the level. It snapped on easily and worked well, but I quickly learned that the closet is not at all level! The baseboards are uneven, the side of the wall gets more narrow at the top and the level showed that it was slightly off. So I just started by lining the stencil up with the baseboard, as close to the corner as I could get and then just aligned the rest of my stencils based off of this first one.

For my method, I first started with the brush. I just personally prefer holding a brush rather than a roller so I dabbed some paint on the first two rows of dots. It was looking a little sponge painted, so I decided to try the roller on the next rows. Here is the difference between the two finishes.

I decided to go with the rolling for a more consistent paint application. You can also see from the above picture that my stencil is not completely touching the wall. I was worried this would be a problem with bleed through and that I would need the spray adhesive but it did not cause any problems! Once I rolled over a dot, the pressure applied pushed the plastic stencil flush to the wall for a clean line.

The absolute key to this process? Don’t overload your roller. I did two very thin coats of paint on each dot– too much paint at once will cause bleed through.

Once it was time for the next stencil, I just overlapped the top row of the stencil I just did with the bottom row of the one I was about to start.

I also gave it about 5-10 minutes between moving the stencil so that the outside was not soaking wet with paint when I peeled it off the wall. Mostly to protect my shirt, since my belly protrudes and pulling the stencil off made it smack into my body. It also gave me a break in between rolling. I even had Mike do most of the repositioning and taping so that I got a good 15 mins between each rolling session. I had no issues whatsoever with paint being on the back of the stencil, so I didn’t have to worry about it being completely dry when I moved it.

The halfway point (6 sheets of stencil)…

I repeated sheets like this until I got to the point where I could no longer fit a whole sheet. Then, I just overlapped the amount of dots I needed to get as close to the corners as I could.

Once I got to the top, I only needed an extra row of dots to hit the ceiling.

So I aligned my stencil with the existing dots and only had to paint the top row.

Then, I was all done!

Before…

After!

The stencil was really pretty much fool proof to use. My dots came out clean with minimal effort. This particular stencil was extremely forgiving when it came to aligning and overlapping areas.

The dot color is the same paint as our trim in the room– Olympic’s Crumb Cookie in a semi-gloss finish.

I’m so happy that I decided to stencil the closet and I can’t wait to see it with the closet organization system all in. Hopefully that piece that we’re missing arrives soon so we can get this all settled and packed with clothes!

Special thanks to Cutting Edge Stencils for sending me the stencil, roller, brush, level and inspiration. I would definitely recommend their stencils to anyone interested, the options they have are seriously endless and droolworthy.

Repetitive disclosure: I received the supplies necessary for this project in exchange for a product review. All opinions expressed are 100% mine.

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!