Well, That's.....Disappointing.

A few posts ago, I wrote about some of my worries.  One of those worries was about the nursery. For a long time, I didn't seem to think I needed a nursery. But I don't know if it's the nesting drive that has kicked in, or some weird, instinctual mother thing to get the den ready, but I NEED to have a quiet space now. Seriously, it is keeping me up at night.

I also posted (in that same blog entry) pictures of the nursery in it's then current state.  It was a sad site, y'all.  It was giving me nightmares, especially every time I had to climb over the futon in order to hang something in the little corner of the closet.  Thankfully, since then, I have been BUSY.  The electrical work is done, so all the tools are out of the space. I used to have 2 Ikea bags full of things for the nursery, but I have emptied all of them out. I also cleaned out the closet. Unfortunately, I didn't take before pictures, but suffice it to say, it was in DIRE need. For example, here is a pic of my organizing work, in progress:

The closet is now finished, though. There were a ton of boxes filled with random junk, and they have all been reorganized and labeled (I really think my labelmaker is my favorite gift ever--yes, I am a huge fatty nerd).

Now, I am able to safely and neatly get to the pack-n-play, and also to the closet, without climbing over anything!

I have also been crafting. I made yarn-covered letters that spell out baby girl's name:

I hung up my Chinese lanterns:

I made a wreath and pinned mom's old brooches to it:

I made some shelves:

And I bought a dresser on Craigslist to refinish:

The refinishing has been a process.  I thought about just painting over the existing color. But the people hadn't done the greatest job on it--they had painted it a white color, and then put a light brown stain on the top to make it the cream color. The stain had run in several places, and it didn't look great. Plus, on a couple of places on the drawers the paint was peeling off. I decided to just sand the whole thing down and start over.

The sanding took a while. As you can see, the paint didn't completely come off all of the drawers, but I went down as far as my preggo muscles could take it. I figured, a rough sanding, a finer sand, then Kilz and paint would be great.

I found a really fun ombre paint design on Pinterest and decided to do the drawers in green, and the rest of the dresser in straight white (Polar Bear White, to be exact).

Even had the boys to help me.

Well, they were more like supervisors, to be honest.

The whole sanding/priming/painting process took me about 4 days total. My landlady came over and helped me sand the dresser (lots of little crevices), but other than that, I did all of the work myself. I was so proud!

The only thing left was the handles. I'm thinking that this weekend, we'll have the handles on, and Nick and our landlord can carry the dresser into baby girl's room.  The original handles looked like this:

The brass part was okay, but where it is darker was just grungy. I asked Nick to help me clean the handles off. We've been soaking them in boiling water for days, and when I took a nap on Sunday afternoon, he scrubbed the handles and applied a primer coat--I've decided to paint them a glossy white.

This is where the problems started.

The primer that Nick used was old, and so it didn't stick well to the handles. It clumped in places, or plain rubbed off in others. So, we stuck them back in to take another soak bath. Yesterday, I went to take them out and start scrubbing again, when I realized that sometime in the last couple of days, the lid on the soaker must have moved, and so there was no water--which means the handles were just baking and making the paint extra crispy. Nick tried to work on them today, but he thinks they'll need to soak a little more.

No problem. We'll just move the dresser upstairs so that I can start putting things away--I am almost literally itching to do ANYthing to the dresser at this point.

But, no. Currently, the dresser is in the garage, and Nick is heating all of the drawers and scraping the paint off, and sanding it down to bare wood.

Wait, what??

Yeah. Apparently, when the previous owners decided to paint the dresser white and then stain, they didn't do anything to the dresser to prep it for painting. They just slapped the paint down on the stained wood that was underneath. When I sanded, I got down to bare wood in a few parts, but overall it was sticking well, so I just did the best sand I could. I didn't even realize there was a darker wood finish underneath (now I do--if you go back and look at the 2nd picture of the dresser, you can see the darker finish).

BUT...

When my paint was drying (sitting in the sun, because I was doing all my painting outside--the only place that has room), a bubble formed on one of the drawers. I didn't think much about it, but when Nick looked at it, he decided to fix it. He cut a square around the bubble and started to sand a little bit of it to repaint that section--and all the paint on the whole drawer peeled off in a big strip.  Because of the previous paint job's lack of prep, my beautiful paint couldn't stick, and was now going to have to be re-done.

If there is one thing I REALLY hate, it's finding out that 3 weekends of work was for absolutely nothing.  And since I painted almost a month ago, I am much bigger in the belly than I was then, and painting this time around is not going to be easy.

I went down and watched Nick sand for a few minutes, and I couldn't help but cry. I really haven't been emotional at all this pregnancy (really, I haven't--I think baby girl is evening me out), but watching all my hard work get stripped off in about 5 minutes did me in.

I was SO proud. I kept going back to my "finished" dresser pictures and smiling, and thinking, "I did that! I did that all by myself!"  I would go and look at it in the garage and think, "In 15 years, when we're still using this dresser, I can be proud to know I did this work myself!"

But now, I'm sitting upstairs in my baby's room, looking at a space where the dresser was supposed to go today, and wondering how it all went wrong.