Baby Bottles to Battleships: Nursery to Big Boy Room Makeover {Before}

Hey, Friends! I’m so excited to share that we are embarking on our second One Room Challenge this month! The One Room Challenge is put on by Calling it Home every April and October and is so fun! The challenge is to take one room in your house and give it an overhaul in just 6 weeks, posting and sharing your progress every week! Remember last fall when we redid our entire bathroom?

Guess what we’re up to this time? Little Man’s room! He has been slowly outgrowing his nursery the last couple of years and as much as I try, I just can’t seem to slow down time and keep him little forever. So, forward we go! This month, we’re taking his room from nursery to big kid!

I realized I have never actually shown you his nursery on the blog before, so enjoy this little trip down memory lane! While we were eagerly awaiting Little Man’s arrival, we got to work on his room. Jeremy assembled furniture…

…while I grew our tiny human. Here I am a day before giving birth.

Just kidding, I was only 5 or 6 months pregnant here. I have the shortest.torso.ever. When I’m pregnant, I look really pregnant. Go big or go home, right? Here’s the last belly picture (36 weeks maybe?) before Little Man was born… basketball belly, mom haircut, swollen face and ankles, oh yeah!

So, back to the nursery. Jeremy’s one request was that we paint it blue. I couldn’t pick a paint color for the life of me and ended up crying at the paint store because I couldn’t decide on a color. Pregnancy hormones don’t play, folks. Ha!

We ended up with a pretty blue that we both loved! It was from Sherwin-Williams, but they have discontinued the exact shade. I should mention, these pictures are from before my blogging days, so excuse the quality. 🙂

I have never been a huge fan of overly themed rooms, so we went with a simple striped crib bumper and solid green textiles. This was, of course, before I knew that curtains need to touch the ground. Live and learn. And take your curtains down to the floor. 😉

We did bring in some turtle accents, though, which we both loved! The turtle lamp was from my Grandma and aunt and I still love it. The ceramic turtle was an art project Jeremy did in high school! We also had the cutest turtle mobile ever, but I can’t find a picture of it. Sad times. The truck was from Jeremy’s childhood and his parents collected fun construction vehicles for Little Man to display on it.

Our old house had some cool sloped ceilings, which made for a fun little reading nook in the nursery. That was my favorite spot in the room!

When Little Man was one, we moved into our current house. To try to keep things calm and familiar, we painted his new room the exact same color and decorated it pretty much the exact same way. I did learn to get longer curtains, though!

When we were pregnant with Little Girlie, we transitioned Little Man into a big boy bed. At that point, we weren’t ready to redo his entire room, so we made a few changes and tried to work with the existing paint and curtains. Check out some of the projects we have done to help his room grow with him:

Repurposed Train Table

To the Moon and Back Painting

Monogram Car Art

Brown Bear Sign

Here’s how his room is looking now. I left the table out just how he left it this morning so you could see how little floor space he has left when he’s using his table.

That extra closet shelving we added is still waiting for paint. Clearly, we just purged. This closet is usually a mess because the storage bins are not all within reach for Little Man.