Hey guys,
Long time no post! You may be asking why it's been a while and it's just the usual; life getting in the way with motherhood and working. BUT, I'm now back kicking off 2020 with new content!
During the Christmas holidays, Andy and I "tried" tackling some DIY jobs around the house, and when I say "tried" I mean we STILL ARE doing the same chores because we're the biggest laggers ever.
Anyway, if you've been a follower of my account previously, you maybe remember this post of the girl's (Maddi & Miki at the time) room with the feature wall that was filled with polka dots?
This was the girl's shared room back in 2018 and as you can see, it was just a little bit girly. At the time, we chose a lot of products and decor from local & handmade businesses as we absolutely LOVE supporting small businesses! :)
Well, fast forward 2 years and that room now belongs to Mabel & Micah! Part of the work planned over Christmas was to redesign the room so it that it will now suit both a boy and girl, and I'm being honest when I say this - but it was extremely hard. I just had such a hard time visualising a concept that wasn't too girly or too boyish!
The other objective we were trying to hit was to spend as little as possible so we reused a lot of our existing stuff to save cost, I'd say about 90% of the things in the room we already owned. We tried adding some new colour into the room to make it more gender neutral and here's what it looks like now - I hope you guys like it!
Welcome to Mabel & Micah's room
I am so excited to show you all our reused favourite items we have in the kids room that we highly recommend! But first, let me show you what IS new in the room now: these EasyCraft panels that we got from Bunnings that also just happens to be my new favourite highlight of the room!
It's a relatively straight forward job that you can do at home yourself if you've a few tools like a circular saw, nail gun & silicone gun. It ended up costing us just under $400 for the panels, paint and hardware to complete the job.
We didn't like the designs of any of the 900x1200 half height panels Bunnings sold, so we ended up choosing a full height 2400x1200 panel design that we did liked and asking them to cut them in half for us. This now meant the panels would come up higher on the wall (1200 height instead of 900) and it was also wayyyyyyy easier to transport them home - no van hire required!
Anyway, back to the stuff that we ended up keeping to reuse!
First up; the amazing house bed that I think I will never ever be able to toss away. Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to tell you where we purchased it from because.. my dearest husband built this from scratch! Andy originally built it for Maddi (which has been passed down to Mabel) because we couldn't find anything on the market that DIDN'T have a top beam on the entrance side - could you imagine us adults bending down to put our kids to bed? Knowing how clumsy we are, the first thing we would have done was hit our heads on that top beam. So you can see that our 'house bed' doesn't have that cursed beam across the top and we find that it works pretty well, credit all goes to "Handy Andy" for this one. Two other favourites in this picture are the Kmart make up table as well as the wall decal polka dots from Little Cooper Lane.
This Brandt rocking chair from Luxo Living has been a lifesaver during the newborn stage.
It's a 2-in-1 convertible arm chair which means that you can actually change the legs when/if you no longer need it to rock. Unfortunately the grey is currently sold out but they do stock so many other beautiful colours so go and check them out!
If you haven't heard of Little Wiwa play mats, then you are definitely missing out! I can say with personal experience that I have TESTED these overnight (when settling Mabel in her house bed and then being too tired to crawl back to my room) and they are extremely soft! The one you see here under the Jupiduu slide is the 1.2m cirkular which is now only sold in the 1.4m cirkular size, there's also the Generös 2m x 1.4m size. The mats are also SUPER EASY to clean and I love that they're reversible printed; so you get two patterns.
We have been loving our Kodak C525 Cherish baby monitor. It's been such a life saver because of the rechargeable battery on the camera unit, meaning we never have to look for a power point again when moving around the house. The other awesome feature is that there's a Kodak smart phone app that allows us to check on Micah with a live feed through WIFI when either of us are out. Here's a link to Andy's quick blog post and unboxing video if you're after any more details on it: https://www.babycarenursery.com.au/blogs/babycarenursery/kodak-cherish-c525-quick-look-at-the-high-definition-smart-baby-monitor
And just a few more photos to wrap this one up. Any questions, just let me know!