:: cleanifying ::

tara gentile (also of scoutiegirl fame) featured my up up redesign on her personal blog today among several other minimalist blog designs. i was pleased as punch. i was telling her that i wish i could revamp my home as easily as i revamped the blog: change a few hexadecimals here, hit delete a few times over here, slide this gadget over above this other one.

i love a home that looks lived in and i believe in having the things we use everyday close at hand, but man would i love to just click a few keys and be able to downsize and declutter and cleanify everything around me. much as i hate to clean and organize and all, i crave a peaceful and orderly environment. not stark, just a little bit sparser.

the only place in this house i've really been able to achieve that is in emily's room. i've been meaning to post (okay, also meaning to take) these photos for a long time. well, today's finally the day. behold: the nursery.

{ we kept the walls as they were when we moved in: a sort of very pale soy latte sort of color. i also chose to reuse some of the blue things we had from evan's nursery. blue happens to be my favorite color even though i'm a girl and i just like that it keeps emily's mostly-pink room from seeming overly pink. }

{ most everything about the room was inspired by the quilt here behind evan's head which was intended as a wall hanging but which has taken up residence here on the chair instead, which is just fine by me. i just fell in love with the fabric (red letter day by lizzie house) and how it was childish and fun and pink and orange and brown without being all girly. the leftover fabric also features prominently in the embroidery-hoop wall art throughout the room. i also used coordinating solids for the mobile. }

{ can't resist including this great shot of evan. he "helped" me take all these pictures. }

{ i removed the animals and reused the parts from evan's mobile (a jungle-themed mobile from babies r us) to make this one for emily (you can find a link to the fabric pom pom tutorial here). she loves it so much. smiles whenever we place her beneath it on the changing table. because i was able to reuse and repurpose some stuff, the only new things i had to buy for emily's room were sheets for the crib (plus the fabric and the embroidery hoops already mentioned). }

{ more fabric art. such an easy and pretty way to decorate nursery walls. }

{ hand-embroidered by yours truly. a lowercase e for my little emily. (i've taken to referring to evan as uppercase and em as lowercase. i know, i know.) my spiffy new camera shows off the remains of the chalk lines i drew before embroidering. thankfully you really can't see them in real life. }

because we decided not to reuse evan's safari-themed nursery decor and because the room was empty when we started, and perhaps especially because i didn't want to spend more than about $100 on new things for the room, i had a completely blank canvas and the opportunity to put in just enough and no more. her nursery is pretty tiny, and she doesn't have toys strewn about yet, so hers is the room in the house now that is the most peaceful, most orderly, and most pulled together.

i'd love it if i could do the same for my own bedroom. just wipe it clean and start fresh. the first thing i'd banish would be laundry, both clean and dirty.

it's a pipe dream, i know. it would result in laundry strewn about other parts of the house, which would be no better. but still. a girl can dream, right?

***

p.s. who knows why there aren't any books in emily's gramps-made book rack. god knows there are books everywhere else in the house. there's a stack of kids' books nine inches high by my feet as i type!