Lenora's sweet vintage nursery

Check out my nursery on Project Nursery and give it a rating.

Eclectic, vintage, and pretty. That's how I describe my daughter's nursery. I had so much fun decorating her little space in anticipation of her arrival. She just turned one and it's about time I wrote a blog about her nursery and how it came together.
The room started as her brother's room, with superheroes painted on the dark periwinkle textured walls. This was not going to be an easy transformation. I searched my photos and could only find this action shot of the boys with one of the 4 superheroes in the background. (That's a Transformer arm and leg in the right top corner).





  
We started with a few paint color choices, including pale pink, peach, spring green, and a golden yellow color. I painted a square of each on the wall and looked at them for a few days. Surprisingly I liked the spring green, which was probably my last choice. It was so bright and warm in the sun and yet soothing in the nighttime. Perfect for a nursery. I used the quilt that I found at Land of Nod Outlet for color selection. It had many colors on it, stripes of different patterns, with magenta, peach, pink, gold, and green. I think it was called patchwork paisley or something like that.



                 To paint over the mural we chose a quality paint and we did not do a coat of white first. We did 2 coats of green and made sure and go over where the heroes were painted a few extra times. The end result was a gorgeous green, kind of pretty green, like new buds on the trees in the springtime. The color looked really nice on the walls and really gave the room an earthy feel, especially with the nice brown hardwood floors.

 

Once the walls were done, we added the boys' old white crib (good thing I saved that!) and dresser and a pretty little vintage side table. Now came the fun part, decorating! Pinterest was a big source of inspiration, in fact I had a whole board dedicated to decorating the nursery. In fact it might have made it harder for me because I wanted to do so many of the cool ideas I found. Scouring local boutiques, thrift shops, and discount stores (TJ Maxx, Big Lots) we found tons of great stuff  to make this nursery one of a kind. 

Peoria is lucky to have some super sweet small shops that have handmade or one of a kind items. Relics is an awesome local shop we hit up for some of the decorative items in the nursery. We found the sweet fairy print and statue there. Lost and Found is where I found the re-purposed frame turned photo display, which was painted pink and then strung with chicken wire. (I later added some branches and birds and yarn). Restoration is a very cool shop in the Sunbeam building. We found the shelf for above the changing table there as well as some vintage ballerina prints. The sweet vintage dress was from the Moss Avenue Sale, which happens once a year in June.

The dresser/changing table and the green wardrobe are both from IKEA. The lamp and the sweet fox, carrot, and strawberry softies are also from IKEA. I also hit up many a Goodwill, Salvation Army, and church thrift shop. That is where many of the knick knacks, frames, and other little pieces came from. The dollhouse is mine from childhood and I was so happy to break it out, though it will be a few years before she can actually play with it.                                                                                                                                                                                      

During December, a friend and I went to the Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago, where I found the    perfect art print to hang in the nursery. The colors were so complimentary to what we were using, and I loved the silhouette or the tree and children playing instruments. Next came the DIY projects inspired this website that was found on a pinterest pin. I thrifted some embroidery hoops at the local Goodwill and added some pretty fabrics and hankies. They were then hung above the crib. Super easy and cheap project that looks AWESOME! love this idea!

I really wanted a branch with birds as a mobile, but I couldn't figure out how to use it in the space. Instead I added branches and birds to the chickenwire frame/photo board. It looks really cool hung on the wall next to the embroidery frames and I like having somewhere to display photos, cards, and other items. The room looks so unique and eclectic, with all of  the neat vintage and handmade pieces.

I made the crochet blanket on the bed. I found the free pattern on ravelry, rainbow ripple baby blanket. I bought gorgeous yarn from a sweet local store, Fiber Universe. We took the sliding doors off of the closet because we wanted to utilize the space. We pushed the vintage bookcase in the closet, stuck in some baskets for above the head storage and bought a corner fitting hamper. I found the sweet maroon curtains and pretty embroidered bird pillow at the local Big Lots. 

               Check out my nursery on Project Nursery and give it a rating. Had a blast putting it together and now Lenora has fun playing and chasing her kitty around her room.

A Hoosier is not just a resident of Indiana....

      I'd been looking for years for a cool furniture piece to put in my kitchen, to display my junk but also look super cool. Junk shops, flea markets, church thrift stores, yard sales, and resale shops are the best places to find something old to make new. We are really lucky in Peoria to have tons of great thrift and resale shops. There are about 5 Goodwills in the tri-county area, along with 2 Salvation Army stores and 3 South Side Mission Marts, and tons of other hidden thrift shop gems. I found this awesome piece at a little thrift shop called God's Mission Thrift Store on McClure St, off Knoxville, in Peoria. It is a great little shop packed to the brim with good junk at pretty cheap prices. Like I said, the search for my kitchen hutch thing had been on for years, and I was really looking hard over the summer and into the fall. It was actually a pretty memorable day when we found this piece, because we had been to the doctor to find out the sex of our new baby (girl!!!). We swung by the thrift shop to kill some time and right inside the door was this cute, but battered up vintage hoosier kitchen.


It was a little rough looking, with some terrible tacky stained paper on the insides. It needed some TLC and we were the ones to give it. We snatched up the cabinet and stuffed it into the back of my car. Luckily it separated into 2 pieces so we could sorta stack it in there. 







The good things about the Hoosier, it had all the original hardware, which just needed shined up. Also it had a cool glass display window and a sweet cutout shelf too. It had a pull out iron table/work space that was in great shape with only one major scrape on one of the corners. It also had the flour sifter still in the top left cabinet....complete with some dusty old flour!
Our first thing to do was sanding. My dad helped me sand the cabinet doors until they were smooth and striped of much of the gunk. I had found a cool decorative paper on Etsy that was a retro 40's reproduction. It had a few different colors in it, and initially I wanted teal, but then, after my mom's suggestion, I decided on yellow. We found a pretty bright golden yellow paint at Menards and set to work painting. The paint was REALLY thin.
At first, any little variety in the color or texture of the piece was showing through the paint. We put on coat after coat after coat after coat of paint and then coat after coat after coat after coat. I went home and my dad continued to add coats of paint. Eventually the paint looked bright and smooth like we wanted. Next we had to measure and cut the paper to fit inside the cabinets. I really wanted paper on the backs, sides, and bottom of each cabinet. We had just enough paper to cover each cabinet with just a few scrapes left behind. We used a spray glue to attach the paper to the cabinets...that stuff was STICKY. Gloves were a must!

Here are some random shots of the progress of the Hoosier cabinet. It was about a week long project, with help from both of my parents and with my boys in school during the day. The final finished project was a super awesome kitchen hutch that I can proudly say is redone by yours truly. It was a fun but challenging project and I was lucky to have help from my parents and my dad's giant garage, tools, and
his painting expertise (he paints hot rods professionally).

I was about 7 1/2 months pregnant during this cabinet recreation, so I wore a mask when sanding and painting. It was a good project to help with the pregnancy waiting game!

 

A Hoosier cabinet (also known as a "Hoosier") is a type of cupboard popular in the first decades of the 20th century. Named after the Hoosier Manufacturing Co. of New Castle, Indiana, they were also made by several other companies, most also located in Indiana.

 Houses of the period were frequently not equipped with built-in cabinetry, and the lack of storage space in the kitchen became acute. Hoosier adapted an existing furniture piece, the baker's cabinet, which had a similar structure of a table top with some cabinets above it (and frequently flour bins beneath). By rearranging the parts and taking advantage of (then) modern metal working, they were able to produce a well-organized, compact cabinet which answered the home cook's needs for storage and working space. Hoosier cabinets remained popular into the 1920s, but by that time houses began to be built with more modern kitchens with built-in cabinets and other fixtures. Thus supplanted, the Hoosier largely disappeared. They remain common on the antique market, however, and are still used as supplemental cabinets.(wikipedia)

Finished product in my kitchen. It is a little more piled up with stuff now, but I admire it everyday! I imagine a mother in 1910 preparing a meal for her family around this cabinet, with a kiddo on her hip and bread in the oven. Love the fact that this piece of furniture has a history to it. Wish I could see where it has been.