Twinkle Twinkle little star…
It took me a while to get back to post something new on our page but I guess everyone understood that we where quite busy. Besides two trips to New York City, one trip to Europe (Germany & The Netherlands) we also needed to prepare for a new chapter in our life.
This new chapter started on the 24th of December when Danielle woke me up with the news that we were pregnant. And only 223 days later (7 months, 11 days) later on the 4th of August our little star, Emily Jane was born at 17:35. While Emily was a little bit earlier as expected, the estimated due date was the 23rd of August, we were not fully finished but I would say we were 98% there. But at least her room was ready for her arrival.
About that room, first it was meant to be my home office with an amazing view but on the day we found out I first cancelled my glass desk and office chair. And then we found out that we were limited on what we were allowed to do since we could not paint the room or change the carpet. But we still found some ways to give the room a make over.
First we started with the furniture and after a long search we came across a store in downtown Toronto selling European style furniture from different brands. The store is called Ella+Elliot. After some doubts about the colours we went with a white crib and a white changing cabinet from the Eicho line from Spot on Square.
Since the room is really big for a nursery we had some space left for a nursing chair. We went with a glider from Monte Design, a Canadian brand in Heather grey with white piping.
Now all the major furniture was picked we could started with looking at the decor of the room. In a star bright moment we remembered something we had seen on the internet a couple of years ago, a polka dot wall. But since dots are kind of boring we went with stars for our little one. After some measuring with self printed stars we went with 4″, 5 point stars. We found the perfect decals on etsy.com at FlukeDesign and while ordering I found out the owner of the shop lived in Toronto, after some chatting only a couple of minutes driving away.
The evening we got the decals I started with using some of my math skills from college since I needed to find the exact spots to put the decals. I used the Pythagorean theorem. I never expected that this was something I would use in real life but these was one well spend year of studying. After getting the calculations done and while using the right tools, a self sticking laser level and a measure tape the wall was finished within less than 3 hours.
After finishing the wall we added some shelves to the wall, at first I thought this is as easy as all the other walls in our Condo. But soon I figured out that the wall wasn’t made from drywall but it was reinforced concrete wall… Lucky for me colleague Sean had a powerful drill for me to borrow and in about 30 minutes the 4 IKEA shelves were mounted.
While a baby sleeps during day time and our place has floor to ceiling windows you want to be able to make it dark too. Unfortunately the standard window coverings were not ideal and we wanted something else. At first we requested a quote by a professional company and with 2.500 Canadian Dollar we start searching for alternatives. Somehow we didn’t think of IKEA but they had a very clever solution for drapery for much more reasonable price. And it was installed in only a couple of hours.
So far the room is very neutral in colour and we planned on adding some pink to it. We ordered custom-made curtain tie-backs through Etsy from Dragonsliar64 funny thing is that I didn’t look at where they came from before I paid and they are made in Australia. But within 3 weeks they arrived in Toronto.
Since the wall of stars is pretty big we wanted a center piece for it. We were browsing the web for ideas for a very long time and didn’t find exactly that what we were looking for. We discussed putting her name up on the wall but decided against it. Until we had the idea of a reclaimed wood solution, but the reclaimed wood doesn’t come in the colours we wanted it to be in.
All of a sudden I found something on google: Bouncing of the Walls This is an online store which recreated items looking like reclaimed wood from new material. In our case we had exactly in mind what we wanted to have. The owner was so kind to send us colour samples of the pinks they had available (over 10 different pinks). After picking the colours, and the text: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star we needed to wait another 4 weeks before we received it and it was worth the wait…
The room was finished. Or at least the standard parts. I also added some technology to the room since I love my gadgets. First we started with some nice lighting while the standard light bulbs where just to bright. We wanted to have dim-able lights in the 3 standard fittings we had on the ceiling, after stepping over the price we went with the Philips Hue Starter kit. Combined with the iOS App iConnectHue and the widget this is an awesome solution. We went with a pink coloured preset, a 20% candle light preset to start with. Danielle was an instant fan and before Emily was born we added 3 more Hue bulbs and 7 Lux bulbs to our condo. And to finish the lighting solution in Emily her room we added Hue Tap to easily control the light without needing to think of bringing our iPhones in the middle of the night.
Besides lighting we added also some baby security to the room with the brand new Nestcam. The camera detects motion and let’s us look into Emily her room from anywhere int he world, the image quality is remarkable and the night vision feature is much better as expected. And it’s just amazing to look at Emily while she is sleeping without being in her room. That combined with a AngelCare AC401 (donated by my sister) we have the ideal baby monitoring solution with the movement sensors, the remarkable sound quality of the AngelCare and the Nestcam.
And we added a 3rd zone to our SONOS system, the baby room zone. Just before we wanted to order a SONOS Play:1 for Emily her room my interest was caught by a tweet from @SONOS about the limited edition Play:1 Tone a full white version of the speaker. That was an exact fit in Emily’s room. After ordering the first one we decided a second one for Stereo sound the day after. And I can tell you we listened a lot of lullabies in that Zone already. It’s sounds perfect and it’s so relaxing. And sometimes it’s party through the whole condo when we group all zones together!
And not to forget we also think about old school music with “Horst” the music star!
And not to forget an old-fashioned money bank! Isn’t he lovely?
As you can imagine this was a really fun thing to do while preparing for the arrival of our little princess!
One thought on “Twinkle Twinkle little star…”
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Nogmaals van harte gefeliciteerd met de geboorte .
What a lovely room for your little princess ! And it wouldn’t be yours without the technological gadgets 😉
Heel veel liefs
Phil-Die