Just my personal opinion.

We found this chair at an estate sale a couple of weeks ago. There was a marriage taking place, and a subsequent blending of households, and consequently a great number of rugs, decorative items, and furniture was being hauled off.

This chair was half-wrapped in plastic, and had a tag with $60 on it. It was an ornately carved arm chair with an enormous matching ottoman, the upholstery of which has clearly seen better days.  It was apparently greatly loved by a dog who found much pleasure in laying his head on the left-hand armrest and chewing on the carved wood. (Just a guess.)

I have a weakness for chairs. I also have a weakness for shoes and mugs, a habit I am very happy to say I've officially kicked and don't even really browse those sections in Goodwill anymore. Chairs, though--chairs are hard for me.

This chair needed TLC (otherwise known as a Rug Doctor with an upholstery attachment, some sandpaper and stain, or maybe even an entire reupholstering job.) But I moved a little bit of the plastic aside and sat in it. Oh my heavens. This was probably the most comfortable chair I have ever sat in. And at 26 weeks pregnant, that was saying something, for me. There's not a whole lot of places I can sit and actually want to stay in, these days.

Jeremy saw my look and asks what I would pay for it. (I hate this part of yard sale-ing.) The chair is amazingly comfortable, but it is super dirty. And I don't need another chair. So I said $30--half the asking price. It's still before 12 p.m. and there are several other people there, so it's unlikely the seller will agree. So I made Jeremy ask, since I am really paranoid about the haggling process, still, and hate to be rejected, even if that's sort of what I'm aiming for. 

Jeremy asked, and the seller agreed immediately, and both of our faces kind of fell--Jeremy's because he really wanted the seller to say no, and mine because I'm now kicking myself for not saying $25, or maybe even $20, if he was that eager to get rid of it.

We brought it home and unwrapped it, and I was pleased to see that the only awfully dirty places were the places you sit (or lay your head, if you're a dog.) So I threw the cushion covers in the wash for a couple of cycles, and they came out looking almost new. The fabric on the armrests and ottoman will still need steam cleaning, but at least I could stop looking up "how to reupholster a chair" on Google.



I'm glad we got it. It's certainly the most comfortable piece of furniture I've ever owned. The best seat in the house. If you come over, I'll fight you for it.

When making the list for Clive, I listed moving the closet last, probably because I thought it's what would take the longest.  I was moving Remy's things from his previous nursery closet to the new nursery closet, which was probably half the size. And Remy's closet was full. Not that I actually used all that stuff in there, but it was still full. To make matters worse, the guest bedroom (now nursery) closet was full, too.


This closet was purged and organized before Remy was born, too, which should give you terrifying idea of what it looked like before then.

Here is the after:
Ha, just kidding.


While I thought the move would take the better part of a day, it really only took an hour or so. I actually only moved the stuff that Remy really used daily, which was clothes (already in the dresser, which I just pushed down the hall) and the things in the white boxes (bibs, extra packs of wipes, shoes, sheets & things.)  The baskets are the IKEA ones that I had wanted to paint, but was talked out of changed my mind. Since the other closet was, as I said previously, twice the size of this one, all the things from this closet fit just fine over there. Hopefully soon that closet will get a thorough go-through, but for now it's just fine.

Another thing crossed off the list! That, along with finally moving Remy's crib, means that I don't have too terribly much left to do. Which is good, because I'm already scheming about the former nursery-turned-guest-bedroom. And I have the feeling I'm going to need a list.

• paint crib
  
  
• paint rocking chair
  
  
• paint ikea baskets
  
  
• sew curtains
  
  
• make clive's name in branches
  
  
• make mobile for changing table
  
  
• move ephraim's crib
  
  
• move closet 

Everyone has their own list of the pros and cons of having two children close together. Our Remy will be eighteen months old when his brother Clive is born. Unless I have to be induced early like I was before--then they'll be seventeen months apart. This, is of course, assuming I go full-term. Anyway.

After a near-death experience in the delivery room, you'd think I wouldn't be too eager to start the process again so soon, but I was. My doctor told me to wait six months before getting pregnant again. I waited nine. I think I deserve something for that. Like an extra ultrasound, or something.

Maybe my OB isn't willing to hand out any prizes, but I thank my lucky stars that I have a husband who is willing to indulge the crazy pregnant lady with one million Pinterest nursery ideas up her sleeves.

When we first decided that our "two under two" would be sharing a room, my mind immediately went to furniture. It seemed a shame to buy a second crib when Remy wouldn't be in it too long after Clive was born. We have a twin bed already, so after googling mommy forums for "transitioning a toddler to a twin bed" and finding that lots of people actually do that, we decided that we could just move Remy to the twin bed when he was too big for the crib.

I think this plan was in place for about two or three weeks before it started keeping me up at night.

So I started scouring craigslist for cribs. I wished I could find one like we already had, because I really wanted the furniture to match, but Remy's crib is a big, beautiful thing that sadly is no longer produced and sold. It wasn't ever very popular, either, seeing as I couldn't seem to find one secondhand anywhere in the south. (Either that or it is enormously too popular and no one is willing to let theirs go.) I did think my problems were solved when I found a listing for two Jenny Lind cribs, mattresses included, for $150, but they were actually sold the day before I emailed the seller. (Which, I'll admit, I seriously doubted after the listing didn't come down for another two weeks, although I wasn't nearly enough of a crazy pregnant lady to email the seller again and double check. Nope, not me.)

After I got over my depression from missing the matching vintage cribs, we discussed the situation again and decided that we would buy a toddler bed for Remy, then just keep the new baby with us until Remy was ready to make the transition. I found a great bed and mattress on craigslist that almost matched our existing crib, and that was that. Until we set it up in the new nursery we're preparing for the boys, and I saw how much Remy really, really liked climbing in and out of the bed. And trying to stand up and jump on it. And when I wouldn't let him stand up, how much he really, really liked holding onto the side and bouncing on his knees. Oh, he liked to lie down on it, too. Sometimes. Thank goodness.

And so my stress level slowly started to creep up, no matter how much I reminded myself that he'd be practically two before we had to put him in the bed, and that that was several months from now, and that it wouldn't be like trying to make a fourteen-month-old sit down and stop bouncing (I hoped), and we could always put Clive in the pack-n-play in our master closet if he was as LOUD of a sleeper as Remy was (oh my good gravy was he ever loud) and hopefully Remy would be ready to move to the toddler bed before Clive was, you know, three years old. Because I'm pretty sure that pack-n-plays have a weight limit.

So this was my state of mind when we were out yard sale-ing this past weekend, about the time we drove through a subdivision having a community-wide sale and suddenly OMG THERE IS A JENNY LIND CRIB THERE AT THAT HOUSE I HAVE TO GO LOOK AT IT.

"Why do we need a crib?" Jeremy asks.

"Because the toddler bed stresses me out." Crazy pregnant lady.

I got it for $15. I don't care if it doesn't match Remy's crib.




So the crib desperately needed a coat of paint, and after looking through what we already had (and asking facebookers for their input) I decided to paint it blue. It's actually the same blue that was in the room before we remodeled it, which is kind of ironic, I guess.

We took all the hardware off and I started brushing the crib, which took forever because those little pretty Jenny Lind spindles are so delicate and impossible to paint without it dripping all over the place. So you're constantly having to watch for drips and correct them before they dry that way. And I mean constantly. The other option was to paint with such a dry brush that you'd have to do twenty coats instead of two. I switched between these two methods every ten minutes or so, depending on how frustrated I felt.

I think I had managed one coat on one side of the head and footboard after a couple of hours of work, when I mentioned to Jeremy that I really wished I was spray painting.

"Yeah, or using a spray gun." He replied.

That's when we both remembered that we actually have a spray gun.

If you only glean one thing from this blog, ever, let it be this: only use a spray gun for painting furniture. Ever. We got ours from Harbor Freight for $80.

Things got so easy that I decided to tackle our rocking chair.



It's actually the chair that Mom rocked me in. I decided to paint it blue because it sits on the other side of the room from Clive's crib, and would balance out the un-matchy-ness of the vintage blue crib.

I hauled it outside and started spraying before I realized, suddenly and with a paralyzing fear, that I hadn't asked permission to paint it. But it was already too late.



Sorry, Mom. I don't suppose I can blame Clive for this, can I? No? How about Remy?

It took a couple of hours to finished both pieces, the chair and the crib, mostly because it started raining on me twice while I was working. Nothing can deter the crazy pregnant lady with the paint sprayer, though, and both were finished today and hauled back upstairs to their new home.

Two more things off my list!

Remaining:

• paint crib
  
  
• paint rocking chair
  
  
• paint ikea baskets
  
  
• sew curtains
  
  
• make clive's name in branches
  
  
• sew cushions for rocking chair (I used an extra cushion from our patio set)
  
  
• make mobile for changing table
  
  
• move ephraim's crib
  
  
• move closet (ugh)