Since Matthew is quickly approaching his first birthday, maybe now would be good time to show off his nursery. I'm not even calling it that any more because he is certainly not a baby and when he was, it wasn't finished!
Before Matthew, the room was basically storage and Scott and I had to do a lot of work to purge the junk from the room, and our lives! But what a great feeling!!
The first thing we wanted to do was make sure we had guest accomodations. We live an hour or more from most of our family, and we love having guests, so we wanted to make sure everyone felt welcome. We bought this great day bed from Craigslist for $80.
Please ignore the fact that I use it like a hanger!
The red duvet cover, duvet, and pillow cases are all from Ikea. Scott's step mom made the bed skirt from a flannel we picked out. I wish I could do a tutorial on it, because it's so great! But the trick is that we used velcro to affix the skirt to the bed frame. Super easy! I made all the throw pillows, which I don't think you need a tutorial for, but the gears are made of felt and are glued with Alene's glue.
Here is a close up of the Family Wall above the bed. I loved doing this part of the room. I bought wooden frames from Michael's for $1 each and painted them, and then covered it once with a layer of Modge Podge. I added a 5x7 black and white of all of Matthew's family members. I bought the "m" on clearance at Target... it was white, and glossy... which made it hard to paint. I think it took about 4 coats.
The robots are vinyl wall clings and were purchased from Amazon.com - wish I could say I got them for a steal, but honestly sometimes you just have to dish it out!
This is the changing table area - which by the way is more for diaper storage than anything else! We painted some mini Chinese lanterns that were left over from our wedding and tied them to embroidery thread to hang. The changing table itself matched our crib, Jenny Lind, but was a Craigslist find at $10. It needed some touch up paint, but it looks great! The Yankee photo, while it doesn't match his theme, belonged to my Dad - who passed away 10 days after Matthew was born. It's important to me that Matthew know how much his Papa was loved, and that we hold onto his memory.
This is a before photo - hence the mess - but I wanted to show you the window valance. Scott's step mom made it to match the bed and crib skirts, and I was supposed to add gears to the edges. However, I haven't gotten to that yet, and since we're moving in a few months, I'm not sure if it will even fit in our new place. I already had those light green curtains on there (a Target clearance) and I'm not sure I like how they go either. His new room may have a window makeover!
This is the mobile that Scott and I made (mostly Scott though!) and I will post a tutorial soon. For those of you who are not geeks, or not married to one, this is binary code. It's 1s and 0s that in some sort of smart-people-math way usually make sense. This does not have a code to it (not enough digits) but it's cute and robot-esque. I love this mobile, and so does Matthew. He lays in his bed and points up at it! It's adorable.
This was a gift from Matthew's grandparents so I cannot tell you where it's from, but it's adorable and adds the perfect touch to the room.
This is the room from the doorway. You can see that to left we used an "armoire" of sorts because the walk in closet in his room is still being used for storage. (We don't have a garage so it's full of Christmas decor, camping gear and what not.)
The armoire is actually a pantry from Walmart... it was pretty inexpensive, and my husband just took a few of the shelves out and added a closet rack for hanging. We added the robot clings (from the same pack as above). The book shelves were already in the room, but I kind of hate them, so maybe I can get rid of those in the move. And maybe one day his room won't have so many things in it that shouldn't be (like the printer, that fan or the drawers of office supplies!)
When I set out to do the robot theme I had a pretty hard time finding ideas... especially in primary colors AND that didn't include a space theme (we wanted more computer geek robots than space robots). Pottery Barn and The Land of Nod had robot bedding, however, I'm cheap and I cannot pay $150 for a comforter... not even for myself, let alone a nursery! So, being a DIY kind of girl, this is what we came up with! Hope it helps inspire some robot rooms! And stay tuned for Matthew's Robot First Birthday party post WITH a give away!!