Kalia's clothes

I know an entire post dedicated to my unborn childs clothes may seem a bit excessive, but let me tell you...this girl has some CLOTHES!!  Half of my project time this weekend was spent sorting through her hand me downs from friends that we had already washed, and then washing and sorting all of her clothes she got at my baby shower a few weeks back.  We had already gone through and washed all of her hand me down clothes, but they were just sitting in her bassinet in our closet until we finished up her dresser.

This weekend I sorted out her clothes by age group.  It became real obvious really quickly that putting all of her clothes in the dresser and on hangers just wasn't going to be practical.  And I'm all about practical...especially when it comes to trying to make anything easier with Kalia!

I decided to keep out her 6 month and under clothing, and then put up the rest of the clothes she has in her closet in cute gift bags that I had received from my shower.

Here's Kalia's dedicated drawer for her onesies :

And here's Kalia's dedicated drawer for her pants, shorts, bloomers, sleepers, and swaddlers.

Keep in mind these clothes are from newborn to 6 months old.  Which means they're tiny.  And these are the the two large drawers.

In all honesty, I don't know that she'll fit in most of her newborn clothes for very long, if at all.  I had an ultrasound on Monday, and at 32 weeks, she's weighing in at a whopping 4 lbs and 11 ounces.  With 8 weeks left to go, she easily could exceed the 5-8 lb weight range that newborn clothes (and diapers for that matter!) boast.  Oiy!

We have one of her smaller drawers dedicated to burp cloths and a few bibs:

And then her other two small drawers will be dedicated to diapers / wipes / etc..  We are using this for a changing table too after all!

So, that's just her folded clothes.  Her closet is looking quite full too!

The top row is newborn and 0-3 month clothing.

The middle row is 3 month clothing

And the bottom row is 6 month clothing.

We dedicated the top of the closet to clothes that she'll grow into.  I sorted out the age groups of clothes, and then put them in individual bags based on size.

6-12 months

6-9 months

9-12 months

12 months

18 months +

I actually used the gift tags on the bag to label the clothing size too.

That way, when she's outgrown these clothes, we can do a swap!  I like that the gift bags are pretty up there too...pretty, practical, and functional...right up my Engineering self's ally!

We've dedicated two of Kalia's baskets from her closet already too.

One has hats, beanies, headbands, and leggings :

And the other has socks and mittens.

I've already been forewarned by Chris that he will more than likely put socks on her hands at some point.  He was so cute doing all of this with me this weekend...I had to explain to him what the headbands and mittens were for, and how the swaddles and sleepers worked.  He's going to make such a good Daddy!

It was a lot of work sorting through and folding her clothes, but it was exciting and fun work!  These little tiny outfits are so adorable, and I can't wait to have a little tiny body to put in them!!  Less than eight weeks to go!!  Woot!

Hope everyone is having a great Wednesday!

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Nursery Room - Closet Reveal

It's Friday!!!  You know what that means, right?!  Well, minus the fact that tomorrow is Saturday...and it's officially the start of the weekend...oh, and it's officially my last day of being a 28 year old (yep-my bday is tomorrow!  woot!), it's CLOSET REVEAL DAY!!!!  Yay!!!

All right, so maybe the weekend is more exciting to you guys than anything else...that's besides the point!  Just humor me and pretend you're ecstatic to see the whole closet in all of it's glory, m'kay?!  Thanks!

A few weekends ago, while I was working on the finishing coats of the bookshelves, Chris primed and painted all of the 'pieces' of the closet.  Our neighbors officially think we're nuts.  Bookshelves, closet, toybox, and actually another something else that we've been up to...they think we're running a furniture biz from the inside of our home.

This is really the only 'in progress' shot I've got.  The rest was pretty explanatory...we followed our drawing for the design pattern of it, nailed and glued it all together, re-sanded after we caulked in the seams and filled in the nail homes, and gave it another fresh coat of white paint.

Oh wait...one more.

Chris notched out the side pieces of the closet to account for the quarter round molding and the baseboard.  Our closet system sits flush against the back of the closet wall now.

To install the closet system, we bought little L-brackets and screwed them into drywall screws to attach to the back of the closet, and then attached them to our actual closet pieces.  We had wanted to screw them into the studs, but the studs, of course, were not anywhere close to where we needed them to be.

We did this on the bottom shoe shelves, in the middle, and then again along the top.  We tried to 'hide' them so they weren't too obvious.  We did do a little bit of damage to the walls as we were installing the closet system, but nothing a little touch up work won't fix!

After we got her shoeshelves and the top shelf in, we added in the clothing rails (is that even what they're called?!  I have no idea...the things that you hang the clothes on...), and then added in a few of the baskets that I no longer needed from us doing our own closet update  with the shoe shelves last year.  Score for free reuse that fits in perfectly!

Without further ado, I give you...the closet!

The top cubby is bigger than the rest of the cubbies.  This will allow her to put boots or things that are a little bit taller up there.  The right side is for hanging up longer items.  The mirror can be removed if it becomes unnecessary one day.  We designed the whole closet system to be adjustable (minus the cubbies), so that it could grow with her.

This next one cracks me up.  Kodi wants to know why I forgot to include his bed at the bottom of the left side of the closet (per the closet design).  Poor Kodi...we'll have to make him another bed and put it under the window or something!

If you do go and look at the nursery room closet design, you'll notice that the toy box location is flipped.  That's because our closet isn't symmetrical, and the walls aren't even.  The toybox lid would have had to be shaved to go in on the left side, so we just flipped it to the right.  So not worth it once it was all put together!

Here's one with the bookshelves and the new closet.  I'm loving how fresh and fun everything feels in here so far!

Onto my favorite part...the before and after!  It's hard to remember that we started with this at the end of January :

and we now have this :

What a difference, huh?!

Hope everyone has a great weekend!  We're taking tomorrow off from nursery design and having a bday BBQ at the house...I'm so excited for what my last year in my 20's is going to bring!!  Don't worry, I'll eat an extra piece of cake for all of you guys too.  I am pregnant after-all!

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Nursery Room - Closet Design

I'm not an interior designer.  The only type of designer I can even somewhat claim to be is a chip designer.  Nope, not potato chips, computer chips.  And which one of you cares about that?  No one.  So when it comes to designing things for a room, I go to the drawing board...a lot.  I'm an Engineer, so my thought process is, for the most part, very practical.  I like things to be functional, logical, and then eye appeasing all at the same time.

Well, Chris is an Engineer too.  And he's taking over my go-go-go mentality / work ethic when it comes to the nursery here lately to pick up my slack.  So any input he wants to have, I welcome (and actually love).

What does all of this have to do with anything?  Well, I came up with a closet design a few weeks back and sent it over to Chris.  Being the Engineer that he is, he sent me back his vision of the closet design that didn't really look too much at all like my vision.

Here's mine :

Kara's Closet Design

And here's Chris's:

Chris's Closet Design

Oiy.  The joys of having two Engineers in a marriage!!  Kodi obviously liked my closet design better, so that was two votes to one, so my design won.

........

No, not really.  We weighed out the pros and cons of each closet design and came up with a solution that we're both happy with.

We liked the shoe shelves / cubby holes from my design.  She is a girl, lets face it, she most likely will have lots of shoes. I also designed them wide enough to hold jeans or sweaters, and they're big enough to hold baskets too, so my cubby holes are multi-functional.

Chris's design had large pieces of wood floating from the wall to create a box with the mirror / pillows on top of the toy box.  The point of the frame was to hang the closet racks on it, but it really served no other purpose.  The frame would've had to have been at least 12'' off from the wall too because that's where our rods are going to hang, so we completely nixed the frame out idea and just left the cubby hole idea.

We did modify my cubby hole plans to be 16'' deep instead of 12.  We can fit larger baskets in the holes that way, and it allows us to use more of the actual closet space.

Chris's design did have cubby holes, but they were 12'' high at the very very bottom.  He actually wanted to divide those 'boxes' that are at 12'' into two's, so he gave her four cubby holes.  The problem with this is that we do want the closet to grow with her, and taller cubby holes serves this purpose a little bit better.  And hanging clothes 12'' apart from cubby holes seemed cramped for when she gets bigger.

My 26'' bottom row is pretty low, but that will allow her to dress herself at some point.  Because if she's anything like Chris and I, she will be fiercly independent.  And with my closet design, I've made the rest of the levels unreachable for her to start off with, which means I can hang clothes that I want her to pick out on the bottom hanger while still allowing her to feel independent.  I gotta try to outsmart her when I can!  Yeah, I know, it's a losing battle.

The one thing we did take from Chris's design and implement was adding one large shelf at the top.  We took out my top two cubby holes and added a large shelf across the top.  Cubby holes that high aren't going to get used for much.  The top shelf can be used to put up stuff that she won't need year round.  The more storage, the better, right?!

In the world of nursery decorating, right now we're at a score of Kara : 2, Chris : 0.  I get to claim my bookshelves too!  Although, I do have to be fair here...Chris has done a lot more of the manual labor than I have recently.  You can constantly hear me grumbling around at any given point with some of these projects muttering "too fat, too fat".  It's really fun when your belly is full of paint because you're not used to be so large and you run into everything!  Nothing like a big 'ol belly filled with paint...and belly paint smears in all of our paint projects...sigh.

We got almost all of this done this past weekend, but have a few finishing touches to do before giving you a big reveal, so tune in next week for closet fun week!!  Yes, I'm a dork, I get excited about our custom closets, I know.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!  Happy Friday!!

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Closet Part 1 : Shoe Shelves

As I mentioned before, we're on an organizing kick. This past weekend we tackled part 1of a million many projects that we'll take on to get our closet up to par.

We ladies love our shoes, and although I was a late bloomer at developing that love, it has become a mild obsession.  We have these dividers that separate Chris's side of the closet and my side of the closet, which the previous owners used to store their shoes.

Initially, I put some of my shoes on these shelves, and some of them on the floor.  After that became somewhat of a nightmare with shoes on the floor, I tried to stack them on top of each other without much luck.  Everytime I'd take a pair out, I'd have to pick up at least 1 pair off the floor.

So a few months back I came up with the idea of putting baskets in these cubbies and putting our shoes in the baskets.

The idea was supposed to be that the blue baskets were Chris's and the pink baskets were mine.  The idea was that I'd share.  Bad idea...I took over with the exception of one lonely basket that Chris got.  The only basket of these that actually worked well was my flip flop basket on the bottom right.  I can see all of my various flip flops and just take out the pair I want.

For the rest of my shoes though, inevitably the pair that I want is at the bottom, so all of the shoes that are in the basket wind up all over the floor.  I'm one of those panic great ready people too...my bedroom and closet area slightly look like a war zone when I'm done.  I can be holding what I want in my hand and not be able to find it.  Point being, the basket method isn't a good one for me!

The main problem with the cubbies are that they're SO high.  My shoes get lost in there, and the top 75% is just a waste of space if I set my shoes out individually.

So what's a girl to do?  Add in extra shoe shelves with the help of her handy studly hubby, of course!

We had an assembly line going of mitering 1x2's (the braces for the shelves to go on), and sanding.  After we finished up with 18 of those, we got out the circular saw and continued our assembly line of cutting and sanding.

This was the basic idea of what we were going for.  1x2's for braces, and a shelf lying across them.

We measured half way up, got out our handy pocket level, and I held the 1x2's tight while Chris screwed them in.

Then we slid in the shelves, and wala!  We have ENOUGH shelves for my shoes!

The idea is to paint all of this.  You can see from the image above that we removed the closet doors for this project, so it's not a big deal that it's not painted yet.  We've got 8 trillion quite a few steps left to work on for this closet project, so we're waiting to paint until we're close to done.  It'll save us the headache of moving clothes in and out of the closet multiple times!

Do you see my empty shelf?!?!  I told Chris that means I get to go get TWO new pairs of shoes!!!  He put two pairs of his shoes in that shelf and then a few pairs on top of his jeans instead.  Sigh...I guess I have to share!

Shoes glorious shoes!!!!  I actually can't wait to paint this section.  I want to do a fun blue like my mail holder.  I know it generally stays behind closed doors, but the completion of this project makes me so happy.  It's hard to explain!

Oh, and the best part about this project?  It cost us absolutely nothing to create.  We already had everything!

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