This last month the nursery has been filled.
People say how much stuff you need for a baby, but really until it’s taking over your house, it doesn’t properly sink in. So that we could get a move on, our initial focus for July was to get some flooring down and sort out the ‘box’ (which you can read about more here). And that’s exactly what we did.
Here’s what we’ve been up to in July:
The Box
The box was in a sorry state. And it really was in the way of our original layout plans. However, I’m happy to say that we found some furniture that will fit around its awkward positioning (it’s seriously beautiful – post coming this week).
My father in law gave the box a bloody good scrub down, covered the sides with wood (I think it’s ply), and fixed a piece of contiboard on the top. For those who don’t know what this is (and I didn’t until this month) it’s essentially a work surface. Once the whole box was painted, it fits perfectly with the white furniture that we’ve picked out for the room.
It has been glossed white, so whilst removing this box would only be possible if we physically relocated the stairs in our home (now that would be a heck of a job) I think it’s the best we could have done with what we’ve got, and we’ll soon think of ways to maximise the space above it for storage.You can see from the picture below that it already looks cleaner, and it fits so snugly against the cot bed we have.
The Carpet
We had originally intended to use offcuts from our lounge, since the nursery is actually quite small in terms of square footage on the floor, and the lounge carpet is both heavy duty and neutral in colour.
However after dragging it out of the loft, and the ferrets thinking it was a massive scratch toy, upon unravelling, it turns out that the pieces we’d stored all this time were long stretches of jigsaw-like strips, rather than the square piece we thought we’d hoarded – looks like we misjudged that one horribly.
A shame, but not the end of the world.
The room doesn’t need anything fancy after all so off we went looking for a bargain.
We spontaneously went to window shop on a not-so-eventful Tuesday evening, and ended up buying the carpet then and there, ordering it for fitting on the following Saturday morning. A quick turnaround for me and Joe who are incessant dawdlers when it comes to declarative sentences or any form of decision making.
We went to a local carpet supplier and asked if they had any offcuts which would fit our floor space. It’s a great way to get flooring cheaper and the guys at Urmston flooring were so helpful, I’d really recommend them if you’re based in Manchester. All we specified was that they found us a neutral colour, and we came away with a lovely (and so soft!) grey coloured carpet which I now wish I had in our bedroom too.
If you’ve followed this blog for a while you may know that half of the floorboards in the room have either broken, rotted or been removed at some point during this room’s transformation so before the fitters arrived, Joe made sure all floorboards were either replaced or secured.
As they were so uneven, Joe covered them with fibreboard (bought off eBay) which also helps with noise cancellation and keeping the room insulated. And the carpet was laid over the top. We already had our own underlay stashed in the loft which is a luxury one we bought ages ago from TradePriced.co.uk (so much cheaper than getting it from your fitter). And this is what it looked like!
This was all done in the space of a week and in between all of the mania, our nursery furniture was delivered. Check out my next post to see what we picked!
Whilst carpet isn’t a monumental event in our lives, if you take a look at this room only 3 months ago – when we’d just found we were expecting and made the decision to turn the room into a nursery rather than an office – it was miles away from being decorated, and junk just poured out of it, but hopefully this picture shows just how far we’ve come.
