Young Love, Old Beams: 2014

Of all the rooms in the house, the nursery is the most dear and near to my heart. It has definitely been the one I've waited for the longest.

When Jesse and I got married, I had a feeling it would be difficult for us to have children. Call it a sense, or the fact that I just knew my body and what it was telling me. However, like most young marrieds, we wanted to wait a while and become "financially secure" (whatever that means) before we brought our little ones into the world. So...we really didn't think about it. Our first four years of marriage were some of the happiest I've ever had. And...then the "parent urge" hit. No, we weren't "financially secure" (it never happens) and we were still in renovation phase. It didn't make sense. But...we had a longing to be parents.

After trying with no success, our suspicions were confirmed by the doctors. It would be very difficult for us to get pregnant. Actually, they gave us a number-3%. We considered adoption. We cried. We prayed. We cried again.

We started sharing our struggle with family and others and discovered a lot of other people that went through this same struggle. They supported us. They asked how I was doing, coping, without asking "are you pregnant yet?" On July 7th Jesse and I went to a family gathering. The entire family gathered around us and prayed over us, anointing us with oil. It was such a powerful experience. We went home that weekend and finished putting on the last touches to our house. We were done with one crazy, stressful part of our life only to be going through another. A few days later, we started another round of treatment. Guess what? Well, you know the ending :).

I share this personal story not having all the answers. I don't know why God answered our prayer for a child when so many others have been praying longer. All I can say is that this experience opened my eyes to the very real pain many couples secretly have. I encourage you, if you know someone who is going through fertility to encourage them, pray with them, pray for them, cry with them, hug them and love them. They will treasure this friendship.

Okay...all of this to say that this room has been long awaited for. When we first moved in, I knew this room would be the nursery. It's the smallest room but it's adorable. So...during every step of the renovation of this room, I've thought of my future children. It's been prayed over, it's been cried over and it's been loved.

Here's what this precious room looked like the day we moved in:

It had very old, cracked plaster with white/blue flowery wallpaper on it. The green "carpet" is actually a rug that came up to reveal layers upon layers of tile and linoleum flooring. What we can say is, it needed some work.

We started this room after we had just come off a nice, long summer break from doing anything "reno." Needless to say, I was not thrilled about starting the whole process back up, as you can see in this pic while taking out the tile flooring.

We stripped the room and then hired some contractors to "skim" the plaster. If you're not familiar with skimming (I sure wasn't), it's where they take drywall mud or plaster and place a thin coat on the entire span of the walls to fill in any cracks and make it smooth. Ahh....smooth walls are such a blessing I've come to appreciate.

Like I said earlier, we finished the room before we knew about Baby Allison. I painted it a blue-gray (same as our bedroom) because that's the color we had on hand. Hey-beggars can't be choosers and paint can be expensive! Plus, I liked the color. If you've read this blog at all, you know that I love stripes. So...that's what this room got as well.

When my parents heard the news of Baby Allison, they bought us a gorgeous crib as a gift to their first grandbaby.

And...here's what the nursery looks like now. We went with a gray/cream theme and then made a bold move and added in bright red accents.

This room has "family" written all over it.
My mom bought the gorgeous cream quilt,
Jesse's mom knit the adorable gray and red blanket,
I made the shelf with her name on it and
Jesse painted my grandma's old chair red.

Here is what my grandma's chair used to look like:

I ordered some custom cushions from Theresa at Etsy (she did a fabulous job) and Jesse spray-painted the frame red. Here is what it looks like now:

I love that it's keeping a little of my grandma close.

On the other side of the room, we bought a dresser and hutch to match the crib which can also be used as a changing table for now. Gotta love things with double purposes!
That adorable little door (it's so vintage-looking!) is Aislyn's closet. Right now, we're incredibly blessed that it's stuffed full of diapers. It even smells like diapers! The gray storage bin hangs over the door and makes it easy to grab bibs, wipes and other essentials.

On the other side of the crib hang three frames with verses/prayers that were prayed over Aislyn. We love being reminded that she is a gift from God to us and we want her to know that as well.

Finally, I made this shelf to hang with her name on it above her crib. "Aislyn" means "vision" or "dream" and we've definitely dreamt about this little one for some time! Hobby Lobby has some adorable knobs and Mod Podge does the trick of preserving the letters on scrap-booking paper. ***Oh, and don't mind the photo frame-it contains the picture that came with it. Soon we'll have plenty of "real" photos to fill it with!

We feel so incredibly blessed :)

You might remember from this post that when we converted our bedroom into a master suite, we lost the only full bathroom we had. Well, not really lost, but Jesse and I claimed it for ourselves (I know, we can be a little greedy).
Now our guests would need to travel through our bedroom to use the only full bathroom in our house. Not horrible (I actually grew up in a house of 6 with only one bathroom) but we really wanted another bathroom upstairs.

Wonder of wonders....there happened to be this huge, (yes ugly) but wonderful space directly above our current full bathroom!

It was sort of a weird space, you could say. Immediately upon arriving upstairs, there was this incredibly large landing that was not being utilized. Well, not for long. We had some plans for this space.

I've always been fascinated with magic tricks. Making something appear out of nothing is quite amazing to me. A rabbit out of hat, a dove out of your hand. I don't even try to figure out how they do it, I just watch in amazement.

I did a lot of watching the next few months as Jesse, my dad and a few friends did exactly that: Created a bathroom out of thin air. Well, at least it seemed like that to me.

First, we took off that oh so beautiful paneling.

Yep, it's dirty up here. Hang on with me though..it WILL get better!

Then, the amazing Jesse built walls to frame the new bathroom. This takes talent. Building square walls within a not-so-square house is no easy challenge.