Inspiration & The Low Down

There are a few things in the nursery that I wanted to call out credit for inspiration - without the addition of Pinterest to my life I would be MUCH less pleased with the design.  That being said here is the list:

1. The wood wall:

Original inspiration from Bower Power Blog - I stumbled upon this pre-Pinterest about a year ago and told Andy he was in for some work if we had a boy.  Well....it's a boy.  However, we got insanely lucky when demoing the old wood paneling walls when we found beneath it the original walls of this house were wood! As a result, to finish out our walls we just had to:

• Rid the wood of the old-school wallpaper adhered to it with tacks and some sort of mesh netting
• Yes - this meant taking out hundreds of metal tacks from below the surface...with a screwdriver and hammer, one by one. 
• Fill the gaps - we chose clear silicone to fill the gaps between the panels to make it airtight
• Clean & Sand & Clean again
• Lacquer for seal and shine

2. The Dresser: 

Before: 

After: 

I will NEVER EVER paint furniture with anything other than Annie Sloan's Chalk Paint again. Yes - it is expensive, and yes - it is relatively extra effort to find vs. other paints.  However - the finish and time-saved is beyond worth it. To finish this dresser required the following steps: 

• NO PREP. The top was basically laminate - we found the dresser on the cheap on Craigslist. I didn't sand, clean, etc - I only wiped down the surface with a paper towel.
• I then painted the whole thing with Old White. 
• Next up - I painted two coats of Napoleonic Blue.  For the fronts of the drawers I barely put any paint on the brush and almost dry-brushed over the finish. 
• I then applied the Clear Wax from Annie Sloan to finish it off, and once dried buffed the surface. 

The paint comes in 1L pots - and I literally used less than an inch of the blue and the white - a little goes a VERY long way as this paint covers incredibly well.  It also has zero odor - which made painting when pregnant a relative breeze! Check it out - and transform your furniture finishing forever!

3. The monogram:

The inspiration was a combo of two pins - the yarn and nail wrapped letters, and this monogram pin. For mine, I found a basic font I liked and printed it out - then decided the spacing of the nails. I opted to use larger nails for the exterior of the letters and smaller for the interior.  This added some depth to the B and the D (as well as substantially fewer gaping holes in the walls!). 

I originally had a much bigger frame around these - but wanted to tighten it up and love how the new frame turned out. 

Misc. other details: 

The cow: He was purchased at Canton for $5 - and for all you non-country folk - these are used to stick in bales of hay for ropers to practice on.  He was black - so we just spray-painted him with plastic spray paint in white and added a few bolts and some picture wire to hang him from. 

The toy box: Also a canton find with a cool story.  The price tag on it said $45 - which we were embarassingly willing to pay.  However, being the good Canton goers that we are we asked the man what he wanted for it - to which he responded $10! He said he got it at a garage sale in Montana for $5 and the man he bought it from said that no one in the world would want that old toy box.  Smart Canton vendor promised that man he would bring it to TX and sell it in a heartbeat...which he did...to us! The inside had seen better days that I assumed no cleaner could fix - so I took some fabric I had on hand and sewed a little liner that folded over the outside. Now it is dirt and splinter free!