Creating a Functional Nursery, with Hot Air Balloons!

I never planned to have a theme for our baby girl's nursery, but when I found a hot air balloon nursery in my online perusing, I fell in love.  Her room also required some furniture and closet makeovers.  Here's what we did!

We were given some old furniture, a matching dresser and vanity, from Hubby's family that was nice, solid wood but needed a serious face lift.  Here's the vanity before:

I decided to paint them both antique white (Behr Antique White), and then distress them slightly by buffing up the edges. To do this:

-Sand your furniture reasonably well with a medium grain sand paper.  It doesn't need to be entirely stripped if you're just painting, like it does if you were restaining it.  

- Wipe it down with a damp cloth to remove all the dust and allow to dry.

- I found using a small roller to paint the majority of the furniture to have much better results than using a brush.  I only used a brush on edges and corners.

- Allow to dry and then do another coat. You may want to do a very fine sanding with fine sandpaper in between coats. Wipe off dust.

- Allow to dry then take your sandpaper and rub edges and corners until the wood shows through.  You can go a little nuts or be fairly conservative.  It's up to you!  

- Protect your paint with a top coat.  If you use a light color paint, like I did, use something like Minwax Finishing Paste.  If you have a darker color, you can opt to use Polyurethane.  (It can give a yellow tint to light colors as I learned with an earlier piece I did.)  

- Now, I know it's hard, because it's so pretty now, but then allow your furniture to sit unused for several days to let everything cure nicely.  

- Replace hardware.  I took the old wooden knobs and painted them my accent colors with acrylic paint for the dresser.  Some old metal knobs also showed up with my in-laws and they looked perfect on the newly white vanity!

Here's the finished products:

The vanity is perfect for a changing table now and will serve her well as a vanity or desk as she grows!

Colorful knobs are so fun

I wanted a neutral, soothing color on her walls.  The color I chose is Behr Mortar (ok, not a soothing name, but it's pretty!).  It's a gray with just a touch of blue in it.  I have always loved hot air balloons and flying in one is on my bucket list.  I also wanted to avoid excessive amounts of pink so I chose orange and turquoise accents, with some sunny yellow thrown in, to brighten her room.  I was thinking a playful sky and sunset colors.

Regrettably, I don't have a before picture of her closet.  Imagine bulky wooden folding doors and a single rusty metal shelf and rod across the middle.  I'm an organizer, and the nursery is a fairly small room, so I wanted to make the closet more functional. Here's how we changed it:

We removed the old shelf and bar and the closet doors.  We ended up painting the inside of the closet the same color as the walls in the nursery.  Then we put in a ClosetMaid storage system from Home Depot with baskets from Hobby Lobby.  We replaced the doors with washable cotton curtains.  I love it.  I want to do this to all of our closets.

Now for a couple of fun crafty things I did for her hot air balloon theme!  I happened to have a hot air balloon PUZZLE!  I totally love it.  So whimsical with the balloons all floating over this lovely little village with a castle in the mountains; sort of Swiss looking which makes me love it even more.  I put the puzzle together, then used plain old Mod Podge on the front and back to save it.  Then, I'm cheap, so I just used an X-Acto knife to cut out a piece of cardboard from a box the same size as the puzzle.  I used more Mod Podge to glue the puzzle to the board.  Seriously, you need Mod Podge in your box of crafty things because it comes in handy for all sorts of things.  Then I nailed it to the wall, which is the part that needs some work since the nails are wanting to pop out.  I'll let you know if I come up with a better plan of attack for that.

Then I made hot air balloons with paper lanterns!  My mom and I made the baskets using cheap, cardboard party favor boxes.  We used Mod Podge (of course!) to secure burlap around them.  We attached them to the lanterns with jute string and hot glue.  The clouds were used at my baby shower and it looks like my friends made them with felt, stuffing, and craft glue.  The animals are little finger puppets that were also from a baby shower.  I hung it all up with fishing wire.  So cute!

Finally, not in the theme, but I have to share these.  My awesomely talented and artistic friend over at May We Fly custom made these prints for me after I sent her photos of our pets! She even threw in some turquoise and orange.  She's launching her own business with her crafty delights, so please check her out! I can't wait for the moment baby girl figures out her pets are the cartoons on her wall.  Sooo fun.