The Evolution of a Twin Nursery - Part 1: The Before!

This will theoretically (I make no promises) be a multi-part series on how we turn our empty extra bedroom into the boys' nursery.

Here's a little background information on our house and the room that we're turning  into the nursery. We bought the house last July after looking at what seemed like a million houses. Our last house was within Lansing's city limits and we wanted something that was outside of the city. We were also hoping to lower our mortgage payments by taking advantage of the current market, which was risky since we had to sell our old house as well. We technically took a loss on the house we sold, but we were able to pay off the mortgage just fine. One of the biggest challenges that we found was that we were used to living in a large house. Our last home was a 2,000 square foot ranch home and we just didn't want to give up much square footage. Ultimately we found the house that we're in now, a large and open cape cod style house about 20 miles outside of the city. The house was built in 2002, so it's a nice, newer home...but we bought it as a foreclosure and it was definitely not taken care of. We spent about 2 months of hard work making the house livable before we moved in. The tile in the kitchen and bathrooms was still good, but we ended up replacing all the rest of the flooring in the house. Nathan installed hardwood throughout the first and second story. Many of  the walls were riddled with holes as well, so Nathan and his cousin Tony did a ridiculous amount of drywall work and repair as well. I pretty much painted for a month straight!

This is what the nursery looked like after we took out the revolting carpets that were in it when we bought it.

My cousin Kerry rented the room that is currently our nursery from us for a few months while she was  working a temp job in the area and picked a bright blue for the walls.

The room after the drywall was repaired, it was painted blue, and the floors were done (trim is missing in these pictures but they are the only ones I have of the room in this incarnation).

As you can tell, the room is a very interesting shape due to it being a Cape Cod style home with the dormer windows. The room is roughly shaped like this:

After Kerry left, the room was pretty much just sitting empty since it had been our plan to turn it into a nursery. We ended up painting it last month and spent this weekend working on a special project that I can't wait to share with you! Hopefully I will get around to writing part 2 in the next several days since I am really excited about the progress we have made so far!!

[As I share the evolution of our nursery, please keep in mind that we are not artistic or fancy decorators. We are not "chic" people and while I can appreciate the beauty of a fancy nursery, that's just not us! We will be doing everything that we can ourselves and our budget is super low. I have little to no experience at decorating a home and it was never really my mom's thing either, so I have been making it up as we go ever since we got married. We are just focusing on turning this blank canvas of a room into a fun and playful space for the boys, so expect lots of improvisation, cutesy little touches, and a modest result in the end. ]