Light and Bright Baby Boy Nursery Makeover (Before and After!)

I just couldn’t wait any longer. I just couldn’t. Regardless of the constant overcast skies that are keeping me from taking really great shots of this room, it just feels like right now, at the start of the year, is the right time to show you the extreme before and after that is baby Jack’s new nursery. So just ignore the irony of the fact that these pictures look a little moody even though this is a post that I’m describing as “light and bright” K? Thanks. You’re the best. 🙂

I reserve the right to change things in this room ever-so-slightly and then re-reveal it to you in the future if the mood strikes me too. Because this is my blog and I say so. So let’s get to it!

Welcome to my happy place! I absolutely love this room now. Every time I come in here, I can’t help but feel like everything in the world is going to be OK.

It probably has a lot to do with the fact that the room started out like this:

I wish I had saved more pictures of how this room used to look. It really was horrifying.

Then we started work on the ceiling and it looked like this for a good long time.

And now? It really is the stuff that dreams are made of. Mine, anyway!

Chris added these built-ins on either side of the big dresser. They make the room so much more functional and I love how they look.

The ceiling in this room was a huge project. We tore out the old one added insulation and then painted and hung real beadboard up strip by strip. It probably took a good 5 months for us to get that part of the room done, but I’m so glad we did it. It adds so much character to the room.

We actually still haven’t even touched the inside of the closet. It’s big and spacious, but it’s still filled with a lot of my junk and some lovely bright green shag carpet on the floor. We’ll get to that eventually! We want to cut out a bigger hole and add a real door there, but that’s going to be a big project again. For now, we just added some thicker trim and I painted the door in black chalkboard paint to minimize how much you notice the crookedness of the door. It really worked! Kennedy provided the artwork. 🙂

The side of the room where the crib sits is still a little sparse, but I’m happy about that. It gives me the chance to keep adding to the room if I think of something else I really want or need in here. We’re not really using the room for much yet, other than playtime and storage because Jack’s still in his bassinet in our room. There’s lots of space for me to have a little more fun in here!

I’m a big fan of the trim work in this room as well. I can take no credit for it, but Chris really should teach a class on making all those angles line up on weird crooked old walls. I love that we were able to keep what we liked that was already there and then add in some new stuff and have it all look good together too.

We ended up using all furniture that we already had, so that made things come together pretty easily and made it not such a big deal to spend all that money on adding more and more trim all around the room.

The crib was Kennedy’s 8 and a half years ago. I thought about painting it, but decided I still really like the look of the wood on this one.

I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to get a glider for in here later on, but for now I really like the look of this navy blue rocking chair that I stole from outside.

I wanted it to be a “baseball room” because Chris is such a huge baseball fan and I just think baseball themed stuff is really cute, but I didn’t want it to seem really tacky and cartoonish, so I just added in a few subtle baseball things here and there, mostly DIY projects.

Chris bought this ball pitched by Roy Halladay when he was on a baseball road trip this fall. It was a pretty big deal for him. 🙂

So that’s the room! Hope you like it even a fraction as much as I do. If nothing else, you can see it’s come a long way!