Tickled Pink

Charlotte's nursery. (The curtains appear much more neon in this photo than they are in reality.)

Crib ensemble: lady bugs! I have spent many, many hours in this chair.

The very important changing area.

The little girl (for whom all this girliness was done) sleeping in her new crib.

As I mentioned in last Thursday’s post, I’ll be revealing photos of each room in our new house as I finish decorating it. I thought about posting “before” photos, but it’s sort of pointless. Just picture completely bare, stark, stark white rooms, and there you go. And here we have Charlotte’s nursery! This is the first room we’ve finished, although we’ll probably add things here and there in the coming months. It took me two days to paint—why do 9-foot ceilings seem so much taller than average ceilings? It’s like a 12-inch difference, but it seems like so much more when you’re teetering of the top step of a too-short ladder. At any rate, I’m a total hypocrite. I initially made such a fuss of not painting Charlotte’s room pink, but who was I kidding? I love pink, I adore this shade of pink, and I’m in love with this room. This gloriously girly, pink room. Many people contributed to pulling together Charlotte’s nursery. I painted it, of course, and my mother-in-law devoted around five hours of her life to ironing four hot pink window panels, each with two rows of ruffles. That’s a lot of ironing. My father-in-law assembled Charlotte’s crib, and he and Chris also installed a ceiling light. (For you West-Coasters, one of the obnoxious quirks of the East Coast is that every other outlet is a “switched” outlet so lamps serve as the main light in a room when you flip a switch. Lights—recessed or otherwise—in the ceiling are just not done out here very much. This makes no sense to me. We’ve tweaked our new home, however, to resemble West Coast lighting logic. We’re Seattle and San Francisco born-and-bred, after all.) It took awhile, and I feared Chris would electrocute himself, but the two Hofmann men eventually succeeded in making Charlotte’s room a brightly lit little oasis of femininity. Also, after eons of waiting—more or less since I found out Charlotte was going to be a girl—I finally got to put together the crib ensemble. As you can see, we’ve done lady bugs. As far as wall décor, Chris forbade me to hang any pictures myself (he thinks I just toss them up there without measuring squat, and he’s right), so he hung the mirror, the Degas artwork, and the Darci Kistler (NYCB ballerina) picture. Chris and I also decided to put the glider in the nursery, which turned out well. I absolutely adore rocking Charlotte to sleep in this pretty, pink, and undeniably girly room.