Nesting or...just spending money we don't have

When Claire was born, we lived in a loft condo downtown that had all wood floors. When we were first married they seemed beautiful, but when Claire came along they seemed hard and cold. In fact, she wouldn't crawl at all until we moved into this suburban townhome that had a big carpeted living room, (we move too much is the lesson of this paragraph). Anyway, that has me thinking about our new home and it's hard cold (beautiful) hardwood floors and all I want to do right now is cover them all with thick rugs.

So last weekend we got this "Jennifer" rug for our living room. I realize that the couch is not centered on this rug, but a rug small enough to sit directly in front of the couch (which has to be centered on the windows to look right) would be awfully small and would leave a large chunk of the living room uncovered. We have hardly used our living room since we moved in.

But the second Matt had it layed out, Claire and her buddy had a whole house set up for their animals and they played there for hours! I'm really excited about it. I'm laughing though, because I once had grand colorful dreams for this home (splashes of turquoise! Remember?) in which I would not make the whole thing earth tones of reds and greens and tans. But I can't help myself. I'm sorry. That's what I like and it's warm and cozy so I'm sticking with it.

I think it works. Granted, I have dreams for a nice large leather chair/ottoman where those two wicker chairs are now sitting, but that's really spending the bucks. Please don't notice that our fireplace is STILL incomplete and in shambels.

In other nesting news, we got Claire a really big queen bed so that her room can double as a guest room. Actually, Mr. Tommy gave us the queen bed from an extra he had at his house. It takes up a bit of the playing area, but I think she really likes it for reading in and it will be nice to have extra room for company.

 

We put her twin bed underneath Sammy's loft bed so that he has bunkbeds now. That way Claire can sleep in there if she needs to give up her room.

Across from her bed we set up a table and chair for her to have a place for her crafts and some extra books. It's just a folding table with a tablecloth on it, but it's working for now.

The bed set is a Simply Shabby Chic comforter from Target. I got the whole bed-in-a-bag for around $75 on sale.

On the other side of the room is the little corner where we'll be putting her new baby sister some day. Of course, she'll be in our room for a while, but we're hoping that this chandelier will be hanging over her little crib at some point.

I'm considering getting a slightly smaller crib this time around so that it won't take up too much space. (We gave our baby stuff away after Sammy since we thought we were done.) This white one is from Ikea and it's pretty cheap.

This brown one from Ikea isn't too bad either. I think they both convert into little toddler beds or something because they have all those extra holes on the bottoms. We'll need to do some kind of changing table or something, I guess, so I'm thinking a bigger dresser that has a changing pad on top or something. I don't know exactly where that will go. I hardly changed my kids on a changing table, though, so maybe I won't bother.

 Our own bedroom needs a little TLC as well. It's a lot of wasted space, so maybe we can put a changing table in there or something. And we need new bedding in our room as well. I kept getting tangled up in our duvet cover every night until I finally got sick of it all and took it off. I think I'm done with duvets, but finding a good comforter is hard! Anyway, these are my nesting issues right now. Any advice/tips would be welcome!