A Tour of Our Nursery
I believe in crafting a space. It's in my blood.
My childhood was set against a backdrop of spaces curated by my mom's colorful, eclectic taste, furnished by family heirlooms and furniture found secondhand at auctions and thrift stores. Many pieces shared a similar story--a diamond in the rough, picked from a pile of junk and polished up with a vision and some elbow grease. My childhood home felt funky, energizing and familiar. Like home.
The panache of unique interior design of the gifts I cherish most from my mom. Needless to say, when it came time to envision a nursery for our child and future children, I was compelled to honor this generational gift in the form of a space we would share in their earliest memories.
I'm proud to say that over the course of months and a chain of to-do lists filled by trips to and from the garage, we crafted a space that captured the sunshine of our preparatory season to bring light to the winter ahead.
In welcoming the next generation into our family, thousands of miles from family in the Lower 48, we drew inspiration captured during our first trimester trip to visit my family in Texas and Southern Utah: Zion National Park.
The Mural
Interior design is where function meets form.
In Alaska, there's a good chance you may experience an earthquake or two from your bed, so one of the first considerations for our nursery was being sure there was nothing--no art, no shelving. no nothing--above the crib.
What a great excuse to spend time in the nursery doing something I love: painting.
It's a little obvious: our son is coming, so here comes the sun. Sun, son, here it comes.
I painted this piece on a magical Alaskan summer day with the bedroom fan Zak so skillfully installed whipping around, casting a wind from the open window through the room.
Shortly after, we celebrated Solstice, perhaps the best day of the year, and built a crib.
Furnishing
Throughout the summer, I delightfully took an ongoing quest for furniture. I'm proud to say that every piece of furniture in this room has a story beyond its birth in a factory and its youth waiting in a warehouse. Some stories are known, some are not.
Many items were sourced from Facebook Marketplace and local secondhand stores. Like the mushrooms that appear every August, the introduction of these pieces in our home became a sign of a new season drawing near.
✔️ Crib
I purchased the crib (which is sold by Target) from a mother of toddlers. The scratched, worn edges tell the stories of toddlers' toys flung during naptime and their tight grips on sleepless nights.
✔️ Rocker
We picked up the rocker from a family of six clearing out their townhouse to move to Japan.
✔️ Dresser
My most challenging hunt, we found the dresser at a hole-in-the-wall secondhand store in Midtown Anchorage called JJ's Used Furniture, which is essentially the Cave of Wonders where Aladdin found the Genie. I can't recommend it enough.
This huge six-drawer piece was only $125 with mismatched drawer pulls. I changed out the mismatched knobs for bronzey ones to match the handles.
✔️ Storage
After visiting JJ's Used Furniture with Zak, I returned solo to find a functional solution. Before it was a nursery, this upstairs bedroom was Zak's home office and it became the home of our internet hub.
Babies and wires don't mix, so one functional challenge of the baby's room was finding a way to store the internet hub and all of its connections in a place out of reach.
Like Abu filling his pockets with gold coins in the Cave of Wonder, I ran around the store staking a claim to side tables piled atop side tables at JJ's Used Furniture. I came home with a black half-circle end table for under the window and a wooden, two-drawer side table, which I painted green while catching up with my neighbor, who had recently welcomed the birth of their son.
Not to be overlooked is the white bookshelf, which was once a bookshelf in my childhood home. Like many of the pieces part of our daily life here in Alaska, the bookshelf has journeyed with me through seven living spaces from my toddler years to now.
Neon
For years, I've had a vision to have a neon sign installed in our home. More than a beer sign, a huge, obnoxious sign.
On our way from San Antonio, TX to St. George, UT, we flew into Las Vegas where Zak had planned a visit to the Neon Museum. This is a swath of land in the desert where iconic retired neon goes to rest and potentially be refurbished. Walking in the warm evening to bask in the light was a highlight of our trip.
Zak always knows how to take the most meaningful approach to gifts, tokens of appreciation and acts of service. On my birthday, 8 months pregnant, he surprised me with the finishing touch to our nursery.
Sprinkled with tokens of love from friends and family and stocked by countless Amazon purchases and Facebook Marketplace secondhand clothing hauls, our nursery is ready to welcome our sun.
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