A lamp makeover to light up the nursery

Yesterday, I posted about the first step in putting together a room for our baby - finding a cot in a traditional Jenny Lind style. Today I want to share with you a lamp makeover I did soon after. At the time, we'd started painting the room too but I was excited to move ahead with some fun decorative elements. After all, we had spent many hours cleaning out the room and the huge built in cupboards that take up an entire wall. The prep work is never fun! It meant many trips to the op shop to donate unwanted clothes, linen and other odds and ends we had crammed in there. The upshot of this is that one day I decided to wander around the op shop and stumbled across a lamp base that I thought had great potential. I'd just read Good Bones, Great Pieces (a book I'd recommend by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath) which perhaps inspired me to see beyond its current state. At $5.99 for a tagged and tested lamp, I could hardly go wrong. 

After wiping it over, masking the cords and the bit where the bulb sits, I set up my painting station in our front yard and gave it a coat of primer, followed by two coats of white. As I was doing this after work, I waited a day between each coat. You could do another coat 1-2 hours later but it got too dark for me to do that.

To do the red coats, I needed to spray without any breeze so I relocated to my brother's shed and enlisted his help as I didn't want to inhale too many fumes with a baby on board. You may now be wondering why I did coats of white when I wanted a red lamp. I did this simply because I wanted a bright red which I thought would be easier to achieve with a white base. In the past, I've found that the red appears dull when painted straight over the grey primer. In the end, we did so many coats of red that it may not have made a difference. I think we ended up with 3-4 light coats of red before we were happy with the colour and the coverage. So many coats is probably not something the experts would recommend but I figure you gotta do what you need to sometimes. 

Next step was a lampshade. As it didn't come with a shade, I used several shapes of shades I have at home to get an idea of what would look best. A barrel shade looked better than a drum shade so I picked up this one at Freedom. 

I tried it on in the shed before the final coats were finished on the base and my little brother instantly said it was too big and looked all wrong. I didn't want to believe him. After all, what does a 23 year old shed-loving male know about lamps? Turns out, quite a lot because it looked so much better with a smaller Ikea JARA shade ($29.99), with less variance in the diametre of the top and bottom on the shade. 

The final touch was a piece of yellow bias binding around the base of the shade, although I'm yet to decide if this is permanent. It is secured with one small piece of double-sided fabric tape at the rear of the shade so could be very easily removed. I'm yet to decide if it's too bright a shade for the rug and armchair we'll be bringing into the room. More on those fun elements later. 

Looking for Jenny Lind (the cot not the person)

Big news, dear reader. Tomorrow I'm due to give birth! My first baby is on the way and I can't wait. I meant to write months ago with the news but the time has just flown, and of course I've been busy finishing work and getting the baby's room ready amongst everything else. So here I am with lots of nursery posts in mind.

Let me start at the beginning though when I was on the hunt for a cot. It seemed like the starting point for a nursery to me, and the one that caught my eye was a older style "crib" with turned spindle rails. Soon enough, I found that this was called a Jenny Lind cot. It came up time and time again in my Pinterest boards for nurseries (here and here). 

 Via here 

This example of a Jenny Lind crib in yellow sends my heart into a flutter. So too does the aqua and the hints of watermelon red in the room. I knew I wanted me some of these colours. 

Via here

The Jenny Lind works in serene palettes too...

Via here

...or palettes that boldly incorporate black in a space often reserved for pastels.

Via here

I took inspiration from the hint of dark sophistication in these rooms as well as their graphical rugs. 

Via here

Aqua kept popping up, as did stripes and chevron (or zig zags). I kept noting the comfy feeding chairs in the rooms and my eyes were always drawn to hints of zebra, whether in rugs or wall hangings, like the beauty below.

Via here

So Jenny Lind it was, but how to get one? The internet opens up so many possibilities to us but in reality these things are not always available to us, especially here is Australia. I searched every Australian baby store site (or what seemed like it) and obsessively searched eBay. I even wrote to a fellow Aussie blogger who'd written about hers and tossed up using a third party shipping company as she did to send one over from the US where they are seemingly everywhere, but I felt uneasy about it. One day, I thought I hit the jackpot when one came up on eBay in Sydney but the seller refused to ship. After some wild ideas of how I could get it, I had to let it go and told myself it would need a lot of work and paint to get it into shape anyway (it looked like it could have been 20 years old). Finally, finally, I searched Gumtree and found something. The side rails are straight rails rather than the turned spindle rails but the end rails and everything else are just the same as other Jenny Lind replicas. Better still, it was already white, only a few years old, had only been used for a grandchild and came with a matching change table. Now, funnily enough, in all my searching I had already picked up a Jenny Lind change table but it was older and needed painting. So I was happy to pass that onto a friend and keep the set that didn't need much work. The shelves of the change table had been covered in bright pink wrapping paper crammed with teddy bears and other cutsie things that were not to my liking. After prising this off, I recovered the change table with a fabric from Spotlight. The cot just needed an inner spring mattress to replace the foam one it came with. Here's a sneak peak of how they are looking now. 

As you can see, the side rails are straight but the ends have the cute spindles. 

And here's the change table with the new fabric covering the shelves and a new change matt. 

I also added in some baskets to store nappies, wipes and all that jazz. I had hoped to find white but I got to a point where I had to buy something in fear of the baby arriving before the baskets! Not sure whether to get more for the bottom shelves or keep that few to stow the nappy bag. 

There's been lots else done to this room, from painting every surface and staining the floors dark to switching out the curtains for roman blinds, adding a rug and making art for the walls. I hope to be back to share these projects with you very soon.