When Searching for Important Clues, Anything Labeled "Top Secret" Might be a Good Place to Start

Alan and I did some shopping this last weekend and made some progress toward actually being prepared for the arrival of Baby Ward (at least when it comes to having a place to put him - ha!).  I purchased the majority of the fabric for the bedding (still looking for fabric for the ties on the bumper, but that's it ... and if I decide to actually have a matching comforter or blanket made, I'll need more fabric ... I'm thinking I won't, right now, because I am imagining that I will receive lots of blankets), and we bought a vintage crib and dresser to be painted red from two different antique stores in Greenbriar.  I lllllllooooooovvvvvve painted furniture, especially antiqued/distressed painted furniture - like primitives, you know?  So that's my plan for the furniture (Alan is somewhat distressed over this plan (ha, see what I did there?!  Distressed furniture, distressed furniture?!  Thanks, I'll be here all week!  Seriously though, Alan, like most men, has an issue with painting wood instead of sanding and staining it ... I don't know why this is, but I'd like someone to explain it to me when they figure it out ...), and then I've got a dark brown ladder shelf to bring in and I'm leaning toward a dark brown glider or rocker.  There's a store in Little Rock called Pickles & Ice Cream that had a great selection of gliders and rockers, and they're having a sale in February, so I'm taking Alan there next month to have him help me choose one, and I imagine we'll go with dark brown. 

The dog fabric is going on the outside of the bumper, with the brown minky on the inside, facing the baby (it's ssssoooo soft); the dotted fabric will be the crib skirt, and I want some sort of stripe or plaid or houndstooth pattern of some kind to serve as the bumper ties ... still working on that.

Crib - please excuse my poor quality picture - all of this furniture is just sort of jammed in the garage until we can get around to sanding and painting it, but hopefully this picture gives you the general idea.

Dresser/changing table - again, pardon the poor picture quality - see the drawers over there on the couch?  I think I'm also going to get new hardware, something in an oiled bronze.  I went with a dresser because I thought we'd probably be able to get more use out of it in the long run, like hopefully it will grow up with Baby Ward ... this is a good quality dresser, too, it's Drexel Heritage, solid wood, very  nice - quite the steal!

We're also going to pick a wall paint color this week; it will be some shade of blue, either blue-gray or blue-green, which I've pulled from the fabric.  Alan and I got a kick out of reading the paint color names at Sherwin Williams.  I think that would probably be a fun job to have, thinking up random names for what is, essentially, the color gray.  We've got "Krypton" (Alan liked the Superman reference, and it matched the fabric pretty well) which is a blue-gray color, and "Quietude" which is a blue-green color.  The guy at Sherwin Williams told us to paint the different colors on posterboard and then move those around the room to see how it looks on different walls with different light and what-not.  I'm planning on doing that tonight, since it'll be sunny the next couple of days and give us a better impression of what the paint would actually look like in the room.  I'm hoping to paint the furniture in the next couple of weeks (but I am not looking forward to sanding - boooooo to sanding.  I would just Kilz it and go on, but Alan wants to do it correctly, and the guy at Sherwin Williams backed him up.) and we've picked the color for that too - Sherwin Williams called it "Cherry Tomato" (so, obvs, it's bright red).  I'm planning on doing a good quality picture session of "before" and "after" of the room and the furniture, so that will be fun when I eventually get everything done (so, you know, probably at the end of April - ha!).