Shared Room Nursery Project: Stage 1

Edit: This project is finished! You can find those pics Here or Here.

Room Inspiration

So I can't honestly remember if I managed to mention at some point that the apartment we are moving into is being gutted and renovated or not, but that's where we are at with that. In the meantime we are living at my mother's (again...good grief) surrounded by boxes not worth unpacking, with half the furniture in her garage.
My poor mother.
Anyhoo, while we are here I am still nesting, acquiring things, and planning for the kids room at the apartment, which is super fun! Even if the stuff is all being piled up in one corner of our living space. Lexi has moved to a twin bed, so the crib will go to Talon, we got a changing table at a resale shop nearby, got a high chair for cheap from a friend, got our old dresser back from said friend, got my childhood toy box from my mother, and have steadily acquired clothing from the resale shop and my sister (who's little guy is almost 2 months old!!) as well as blankets with matching burpies from my lovely sister-in-law.
While we are here, I figure I can plan out the kids soon-to-be shared room as best I can, and this has actually proven to be really fun!

Color scheme

These are the colors for the kids room. In real life Carrot Cake looks a lot brighter on the swatch than it does here, so I added the Pecan Praline here because it more accurately represents the color we are going for. The Stone Mason Gray is going to go on the walls, and the Almost Charcoal is going to be the crib and dresser. Lexi's bed, the toy box, and the toy organizer are all white. Nothing is actually going to be painted the blue, orange, or yellow (yet anyway), they are just representatives of the accent colors in the room.

The bedding we bought for Lexi's room (left) And Talon's crib sheet (right)

We are having to piece together Talon's bedding from individual places because I have yet to find any crib bedding in our color scheme. We found this orange sheet at Target (the bedding is target too), and are looking at custom made crib skirts and bumpers on Etsy to try to bring all the colors together. Lexi's bed will have orange sheets also, which I finally found at JCPenny in the right color and size (harder than you would think!) and with good reviews as to the quality. I'm hoping to bring the colors together with pillows and blankets also.

We found all of these pillows at Target (I work there, so the discount makes it worth it to shop there almost exclusively!) And the pillow is actually from a tutorial I found on Pinterest.

And the baby shower is in the same sort of color scheme, so things like the orange pom garland, and paper bunting banner will make great accent pieces on the walls in the kid's room! I'll post pics of those in a later post. I have a big inspiration board for this room on Pinterest called For Our Kids Room. Pinterest has been so helpful with planning these kinds of things! I just love it.

These are some more inspiration pics for me. The banner in the middle is from Etsy, and I have actually considered buying it for the kids room.

So this gives you a good idea of what we *hope* the kid's room will look like. Stay tuned for the real deal, and pics of the baby shower and decor!

::Credits::

Monkey inspiration room: Chiccheapnursery.com

Paint: Valspar

Chevron bedding: Target here

Orange crib sheet: Target here

Pillows 1-5: Target

Blanket: Purlbee.com

Dark gray with rainbow inspiration room: Chiccheapnursery.com

Banner: Etsy here

Gray & yellow inspiration room: Chiccheapnursery.com

Weekly Cleaning List Printable

I've created my first document that I felt was helpful, clean, and aesthetically pleasing enough to consider turning it into a downloadable pdf file! Needless to say I'm pretty excited. I've learned to convert a word document to both pdf and png form, giving you the visual below, and the link to the download below that!

This is a weekly cleaning list that I have found to be VERY helpful, which I discovered on another blog (credited below). However it was not my taste aesthetically so I prettied it up a bit. I loved the way it turned out so much that I've decided to share it with you!

Download this document here

Feel free to download and use as you'd like! If you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them. Leave me a comment and I will gladly edit this for you!

As noted on the document itself, this is NOT my original document. It is a document from Freshlysimple.com that I thought could be put to better use prettied up a bit. Please go there for the original!

Family pictures!!

Yeah, so pretty much I have wayyy too much free time on my hands and like to play around with Word and Paint. So sue me! Anyway, it is nearly autumn (or Fall...barney songs come to mind...ahh get it away!), nearly monkeys 1st b-day (hurray!), and past due time for a family photo or two. Lucky me I have a super cool mom-in-law who got me a gift certificate to a really neat local photography studio, lemondrops photography. And (small world) I found out I know the photographer, she's the daughter of my late father's ex-brother-in-law-turned-best-friend. Yup. How much does that rock? About as much as the dress I found for the monkey on Etsy! Feast your eyes upon this beauty

And once I found monkey's dress I just had to go perusing for deals on autumnal wear for husband and I. Yes sir, I said autumnal wear. Should it be hyphonated? I don't know. Is hyphonated mis-spelled? I don't know. Am I getting distracted due to it being past midnight? I don't know, but probably.
What was I saying again? Oh yeah, so here are some things I was looking at (all oldnavy.com) for me to wear to match monkey without looking matchy matchy. After getting husbands opinion I went with the green sweater, which he chose based on the fact that I'll wear it most because I happen to love that spring green color.

And what will husband be wearing? A plain, solid-colored, v-neck brown sweater. Yep yep. We're going to look like one spiffy little fall-flavored family. LOVE it!

Oh! And before I forget, we're also getting monkey's 1 year pic's taken. But not traditional 1 year pics, no no...cake smash 1 year pics.
Yes, you heard me correctly, cake smash pics.
And just what is a cake smash photo session?
Well, first of all there's a grand example on Jenica's lemondrop gallery under "Fun Stuff", but here's the general idea:
You pick a color scheme. You buy your little munchkin a cute little diaper cover in a color from said scheme (and for munchkins of the female variety perhaps a bow as well).
Then, Jenica has a cake decorator she works with who will make a cake featuring said color scheme. Jenica chooses a solid colored background. She then places munchkin in front of cake and proceeds to snap perfectly amazing photographs before and during the destruction of that lovely cake.
The perk? Well aside from awesome pics, munchkin gets a faceful of cake for free, as the cake is included in the session price (an awesomely low $45.00).
Yep, cake smash. Fun for all, and all for fun.

Woot!

Lemondrops Photography: here

EDIT: Lemondrops Photography has been doing extremely well since this post. And, well, prices have adjusted accordingly. The photography style is amazing, but as of January 2013, you are looking at a minimum of $125 for a session, AND a minimum of $250 towards prints and packages. That's minimum. For example, a newborn session is $575, and in order to get a maternity session which costs $275, you must also purchase a newborn session. And those prices don't include the cost of prints. So please keep that in mind if you take a stroll over to her site from here!