Group 6 4 minutes Read

zerbebe update: it’s a…

Lauren Zerbey

We had our big 2nd trimester ultrasound today and were beyond excited to see a healthy GIRL!

Most of our family and friends were predicting a girl (as did a few old wives tales) and we couldn’t be happier. With three boys in the house already (Kyle, Bailey and Felix), it was high time we leveled the playing field a bit. It’s been a big day and although it’s all still sinking in, I find myself thinking about things down the road – like taking her to see the Nutcracker for the first time or going shopping together. My sister just had an adorable little girl a few weeks ago (the first grandchild in the family!) so it’s exciting to think of the cousins being BFF’s. Kyle is equally thrilled and has already committed to future tea parties with a guy friend who is having a little girl in May.

Now that we know the gender, it’s time to start thinking a bit more about the nursery. On our design page, you’ll notice a certain lack of information on the current floor plan. We intentionally left the flex room blank because it’s secretly always been designed as a nursery. It all started two years ago, when we were getting ready to gut most of our main floor. At the time, neither of us had baby on the brain, but we still wanted to make sure we wouldn’t be making any major mistakes with the size or shape of the space. So we did some research and put together a rough layout that has lived on hidden layers in our AutoCAD file ever since.

For those of you that might be new to the blog, here’s a glimpse of what the room in question looked like when we closed on the house about 5 1/2 years ago:

Before moving in, we tore up the dark green carpet, got rid of the green couch, then proceeded to paint the walls green. Huh. 

In the spring of 2010, we tore it all apart:

There was a subtle framed opening separating the 1910 living room from the 1910 dining room, but because we wanted to make it more of a separate space, we added a framed wall with a smaller opening. We thought about just adding a standard door, but thought it would look awkward and the larger sliding doors gave us more flexibility as our needs change.  

The space has served mainly as a TV room since then, but we did transform it into a temporary bedroom when we had our house appraised last year. (The wardrobe was purchased intentionally for its ultimate use in the nursery.)

But back to the floor plan – since that quick layout we drew up a couple of years ago, we’ve made a few tweaks since and the current plan for the room looks something like this (click to enlarge):

The obvious starting point was to put the crib under the small “piano window”. Even though we’re not slaves to symmetry, it seemed to be the right solution, both functionally and compositionally. Next, we decided to dedicate the east wall for storage. It will help serve as acoustical barrier from our bedroom on the other side of the wall and is the only solid wall in the room. Our plan in to use a single IKEA Pax wardrobe (39″ wide) in lieu of a built-in closet. With the different interior fittings available, we can easily reconfigure the inside to adapt with our little girl. Next to the wardrobe, we’d like to find a nice dresser than can double as a changing table (and then just be a dresser down the road). We’d love to find something used that just needs a little TLC, but no luck yet.  Above the dresser we’d like to have a floating shelf for extra display space.

Although we have doors on the current wardrobe set-up, we’ll be storing those away and using a curtain system. Unlike our bedroom where we have a curtains hung on a suspended cable system, this time we’ll be looking into a ceiling-mounted track to prevent any sagging and provide a safer set-up for little hands.

We also plan on keeping the West Elm chevron rug that is currently in the space. Next to the larger window on the west side of the room, Kyle is going to build his daughter a low bench with storage cubbies underneath. The bench could act as a window seat of sorts and the cubbies could eventually hold books and toys.

In the corner we’ll put some type of rocker or glider and a place to rest our feet. We also already installed a ceiling fan/light combo that will stay.

As far as colors, fabric and all of those other decisions – we’re still mulling things over and doing a ton of research. More posts to come over the next 5 months!

Oh, one more thing. If you haven’t already, you still have two more days to vote for chezerbey over at Apartment Therapy. Only the top six nominees move on to next week’s final voting so we NEED YOUR SUPPORT. It only takes a couple of minutes, but it means so much to our competitive little souls. And when I say “our”, I mean this little girl too:

Look at those two little feet kicking around. Seriously, at one point during our ultrasound she had a foot in her hand, practicing her best Chuck Norris moves. It’s obvious that even the littlest Zerbey means business when it comes to competitions.

And that’s my last shameless plug for this week. We are so grateful for the support we’ve already received, but we know that there are still some slackers out there.  (Yes, you.)