Xander Week 97 – A Big Boy Room
December 4, 2008
Wallpaper Boarder in Xander's Room
After much thought and debate, Zach and I decided that instead of making a new nursery for the new baby, we would move Xander from the nursery into a toddler room. Much of this decision was financial and time related. We’ve already got a nursery all set up, why go through all that effort again? And, Xander was really outgrowing that baby-centered space.
Although it was on our summer project list, we finally found a spare weekend to paint Xander’s new room in November. Xander spent the weekend with the grandparents, and we spent it hard at work sanding and painting pale blue walls and bright red trim. We’ve got a city/country wall paper boarder that we will eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later) put up on the wall for Xander. We converted his crib to a toddler bed – it uses the same crib mattress, but allows him the freedom to climb in and out of his own bed, which he is completely ready for.
Xander’s favorite part is that we put a bunch of his toys in his new room. He’s got so many that we frequently cycle them through our living room, but we just can’t keep them all out all the time. Now with this new space he’s rediscovering lots of old toys he had forgotten about. We also plan to carpet this room, but that requires another chunk of money, so we may wait until after we’re both back at work sometime early next year to get that project done. In the mean time, he’s got a throw rug with streets and cars on it, and he’s been enjoying driving his cars around on that. The windows currently have cellular shades in them (keep the heat in/out better than regular shades, etc.) and we even managed to find some that don’t use strings – just pull up or down on their own. My mother-in-law is in the process of making valances for the windows as well, but she wanted to wait until she has some time to bring her sewing machine to our house and get some better measurements before stitching them (we’re using a basic denim fabric – dark blue that I think will look great against the red on the trim and light blue on the walls).
We’re excited about Xander’s new room, and he seems to be pleased with it. I haven’t taken any pictures of it yet because I’m really hoping to at least get the boarder up before posting things.
So, my nursery is finally complete. It’s been mostly ready to go for about a month now, but we hadn’t put up the wallpaper boarder. Of course, I was silly and only ordered one role, so when my very kind mother-in-law came up to put on the boarder while I was at work, she wasn’t able to finish the room, as she ran out of wallpaper… So, I ordered more, and then we finished the project this past weekend. I am quite pleased with the way the room turned out. As you can see from the picture, we’ve got the crib all set and ready to go whenever the little one is big enough to sleep in there. We’ve got a single bed in the room so whatever parent is on night duty can catch some Z’s or cuddle with the baby, there are two bureaus stocked with clothes, blankets, etc. There is a shelf in the closet that is the start of what will hopefully be an extensive child’s library. The glider is just waiting to rock a baby, and we ended up with diapers galore (yay!) I’ve put some in the nursery, some in our room, and some downstairs with the bathing supplies, so we should be all set there as well. Hopefully the little one will like the theme that I’ve picked out for them. Even if I had known the sex of the baby, I still think I would have gone with this theme because I like it so much, and it’s not overwhelmingly pink or blue, or any one color. I’m sure at some point our kid will want to re-do the room. Hopefully by then our bedroom plans will have been completed, and we can move the baby (then a much larger child) into our old room, and redecorate in some way that they like (and something that I can stand…) But for now, I’m just happy to have this room, which feels very calm and peaceful right now, done.
This week we painted the nursery. When we bought the house a little over two years ago, we spent a week going through the entire house and took down all of the wallpaper and carpeting, and painted all of the walls white, and all of the already painted trip a buttery yellow. Since then, we have been going slowly from room to room, repainting and decorating in colors that we plan to keep for a while. Since I found the perfect wallpaper border at 
My mother-in-law, Rachel, mentioned that she had seen some very nice convertible cribs in the 