The Beginning

It is time to really buckle down and get ready for this baby to come and live with us!  So, we started rearranging things.  You know, I am learning, with each subsequent child, all the unpractical notions of a perfect nursery, just the right bedding, or a dream space for your new baby,  leave your head.  Because you learn (and it has taken me 4 kids now to get it) that all the fluffy bedding, will be on the floor most the time, and you will use all those hospital blankets to keep them swaddled tight at night.  And in a few short years you will want to change all those hand painted details in their room to fit a different gender baby or to go with their personality more.  I know now that the best investments are the essentials, like good crisp sheets, because that is what people will see when the come into their room, or cuter recieving blankets because they will poop through them, and a good swaddle is your saving grace at night.  All the pomp and frills are so fun, and I would do them again, but this time, I know that she will probably spend most her nights sleeping wherever will give us a good 3 hour stretch at a time.  And as she grows the same sleeping arrangement won't always work, so we will switch her her around sharing with her siblings until we find just the right fit for two little personalities. . . and that is okay!   All that being said, I have been sluggish putting her stuff somewhere, because i want to have the best access and  with three bedrooms, she doesn't have the luxury of her own room.  But i made it official the other day that she is going to start out living in the corner of our bonus room.  That is her space.  She has a dresser, and space to be changed and a space to sleep, and there is a comfy rocker to rock her to sleep.  And she will just be a cute little nomad for a while. 

But, baby stuff aside, as I lugged this old dresser across the upstairs  from my bedroom to the bonus room, I realized this brown beauty was my starting place in home projects and refinishing: 

This old dresser was hand made for my dad to use when he was a boy.  It was old and rickety with a cherry finish. When my husband and I were newlyweds we acquired it from my grandparents house, and after a year or two we decided it needed a face lift.  So, I went--completely unknowledgeable of what I was about to undertake--to Walmart and picked up some bison brown paint and some poly, and went to work.  We added new knobs and although it was still old and rickety, it had a nice chocolate brown finish to match our bedroom.  And we had a great feeling making something, we already had, work for us.  I look around our house at our furniture--a vast majority of which is hand me downs, or garage sale, or more recently, made by the hubs--and it has all had our love worked into it in some way or another.   It all started with this first little dresser whose refinishing work pales in comparison, now that we have learned more through trial and error.  It has been such a blessing in our lives to have started working on these little skills of reworking old furniture and clothes to be something that is new, fresh, and exactly what we want.  It started out by just giving it a shot. . . there wasn't much to lose.  The dresser couldn't have looked any more out of style, so we just plunged in, and here we are 5 years later with a house decorated the way we love, and full of pieces that tell a story and have a little of our blood sweat and tears (literally) finished right into them.  And this rickety dresser, our baby of the furniture, so to speak, is all grown up, and will probably need some more TLC soon, but it feels good to see it in it's current form, being used for our new baby for a while.  We had we thrown it out long ago, we would have been one dresser short right now.  So, if you are a blog peruser and you look at the things people are doing and think I could never do that, then think again!  Your first few things may flop, but you will learn from it, and be so glad you have the know how to turn that $20 garage sale bed frame, with all it's cute little details and a bad stain, into just the thing you need for your little girls room!