Yesterday was a busy day for nursery projects as two days ago we found out that we are having a BOY! I’ve had a couple of projects in mind for the nursery depending on the baby’s sex, and I’m glad to start personalizing everything for little Clark Allen!

Project #1 is something that I’ve thought about for a long time, and that’s the giant name letters for the room. I’ve always wanted to have our baby’s name in big letters over the crib, as a statement to the world of who it would be. I started out at Michael’s, but their letters were kind of cartoony and girly for the big 12 inch height. Then I went to Hobby Lobby and found the perfect, traditional letters that make Clark’s traditional name stand out.

But what color to paint them? At first, I thought about white. Eh, too girly with all our dark wood and warm caramel walls. Then, green popped in, but we’ve been adding so much green that I didn’t want to overload the room. So I decided on a nice baby blue, which will pop against the wall color and will compliment our other nursery pieces such as the hamper, diaper hanger, and bumper pad.

Here they are drying on the back side of my craft mat (sewers, don’t worry, the other side is still perfectly fine and is the side I use to cut patterns!). With my leftover blue paint, I decided to take an old corkboard and make a scenic update to it to help balance the color in the room and to use up some little trees I had found on clearance months before at Michael’s. I got this idea because Jason had painted this very corkboard for my dorm room in college, when I was in to hot pink and palm trees 🙂

I painted it blue, then dug out my other set of craft paints and added some hills and clouds. I have six trees and four woodland animal cutouts that I bought already painted that I will mount this week on the outside edges of the board (trees on the bottom, animals on the sides) when I have a chance to grab my glue gun from my classroom. But isn’t everything so cute already???

Total cost for both projects: $7 for the letters (unfinished wood is 30% off at Hobby Lobby this week) and $2 for 2 bottles of blue paint. I had already purchased everything else or had it at home. Oh, and the little wood cut outs were around $0.50 a piece when I bought them a few months ago. I’m so excited to get these up in the nursery this week to show the finished product!
So what are the rest of our nursery plans? Well, here’s a drawing of the final layout:

Yes, I know, crappy Paint drawing. We are going to:

• mount the letters above the crib.
• pick out 5 pictures (one of each of our parents, one of each of us as a child, one of us) and find frames to mount above the dresser in a collage pattern.
• mount the cork board above the chest of drawers
• find a small end table to go next to where the glide rocker and a small lamp, ideally one with a door on it so we can hide away things I’ll need for breast feeding
• buy a small 2 or 3 shelf espresso colored book case to go on the wall next to the glide rocker and some blue and green baskets to go on the bottom shelf for Clark’s toys. The top shelf will be used for books to read to him with.
• buy the outer curtains from Target (it’s actually a cloth shower curtain that I’m going to cut in half and hem – hey, you can’t fix perfect!) and it looks like this:

Any suggestions for anything else in our nursery? Once we have our yard sale next week and get back some of the space we’ve been using in there to store those items, I’ll take full-on nursery pics so you can see the whole thing.