The Nursery Chronicles: Step 4b: Floating Shleves

Happy Monday! I'm sorry I didn't have any posts for you on The Etc. Lists or Never Listless this past weekend. Things have been crazy around here while we get our house ready to go on the market. Scott is pretty much painting 24 hours a day and I am having fun doing Cora-wrangling and whatever house-related stuff I can get done while wrangling. We also had a very fun time with some family in town! When things calm down (will they????) I will try to make those 2 missed posts up to you.

Let's get on with the show:
Last week, we took a look at The Nursery Chronicles. I went a bit bogus on you and sliced a full post into two posts. You saw Part A last week with the book slings. Now, it is time to jump into the world of floating shelves and a little more decorating.

I thought about making my own floating shelves until I found some very reasonably price ones from Lowes that fit the space well. The longer one was about $15 and the smaller one was a couple dollars less.

The directions were easy to follow and Scott did a fabulous job at it.

Once they were hung the fun part came: decorating them! I played around with them for a while and finally came up with this:

(sorry for the awful quality!)

I also taped some pictures that I copied out of books on the bottom of the shelves so Cora would have something entertaining to look at while she was getting her diaper changed. It worked! She loved them!

Since we are about to put the house on the market I have had to declutter a bit. The shelves now look like this:

Not a huge different, but hopefully enough that someone will say, "what awesomely decluttered shelves. I want to buy this house for $10,000 more than the asking price!" That is what you all are imagining will happen, right?

Would you like to hear a clever storage idea that I used for Cora's nursery? If so, read on. If not, click here to continue your adventure. (I really wanted to Rick-Roll you, but decided against it. If you don't know what that is and want to, click here and let Wikipedia explain it to you).
One of my favorite things in the room is Cora's stuffed animal holder. About a year after we moved into our current house we changed out our mailbox because it was really hard to open. For some reason, most of the houses in our neighborhood have enormous mailboxes. We opted to change it out to a regular sized one. If you want to get some more mailbox in your life, you can see where we prettied up the current mailbox here. This postal change-out left us with one unusually large and now useless mailbox. I am not one to waste things. So, I left that big postal paradise hang out in our garage for 3 years until I finally came up with its new purpose in life!

In case you haven't put two and two together yet the mailbox became a home for Cora's stuffed pals. My
 lovely husband painted it the same yellow that he painted the dresser. I bought a green laundry bag so the rusty bits of the mailbox didn't mess up Cora's friends and a new stuffed animal wrangler was born. (Who knew that a little talk about floating shelves would involve so much wrangling talk).

We have made it through 4 whole steps in this baby abode. 6 steps until the grand finale! 

Step 1: Get rid of the old furniture and try out some more baby-centric duds for the room. Crib, bookshelf, and daybed.

Step 2: Convince my husband to do more painting than anyone would ever want to do in their whole life. Start the painting spree by painting over the headboard on the wall. Get a dresser/ changing table and refinish it.

Step 3: Get some more furniture. Start the decorating: Wire display for pictures.

Step 4a: Put up the book slings.

We  made it 3 whole steps before I divided one up. Yes, I'm very sorry. I had to add a part a and part b to Step 4. It was getting a bit long. So, now you get to enjoy it in 2 parts.

Step 4b: More decorating: Floating shelves.

Step 5: Decorations, Part 3: Hang art above the crib and all around the room

Step 6: Refinish side table and get a few more pieces of furniture

Step 7: Paint the chalkboard and mirror and hang them.

Step 8: Put up the curtains. Line the inside of the dresser with some of my extra fabric

Step 9: Finishing touches.

Here are some photos of the rest of the nursery!