EEEEK!!! What do you think?! I have been dreaming of designing a baby girl nursery of my own for so long and I cannot wait to make her space special, feminine and peaceful!! I’m sure some things will change, but this is a general idea of the vision that I have for her space. I know that the beautiful rug from the Rifle Paper Co x Loloi Collection is going to be the star of the show. (You can shop the collection HERE ). The rug is backordered until October, and I cannot wait to get it in. I am picturing an oversized print of some sort behind the crib, and I’m thinking this may be something I will DIY. We will see! So much to do, and I am just praying I have the energy to do it all. I just wanted to share this peek of what I’ve been designing and dreaming of, and I rounded up all of the links for y’all in case you’re working on a little girl nursery of your own. I can’t wait to see my vision come to life, but mostly I can’t wait to have our little girl in our arms.

I’ve been dreaming of a cozy, neutral rug for our living room as the holidays approach, and RugsUSA.com never lets me down! Right now they are having a huge black friday sale! Up to 75% off site wide!! I found the perfect rug for our space that I know will look great as the seasons change. Rugs USA is one of my favorite places to buy rugs because of their amazing selection and prices! I chose this beautiful Felted Wool rug because of the variations of neutral it has throughout. It has beige, cream and gray woven through it, so it’s bound to match any decor that I change in and out! I love the texture it brings! I’ve rounded up a few of my favorite rugs from their site for you to check out below!

If you’ve been around long enough you have probably heard me mention that I breastfed my almost 3 year old, Lawson, until he was 17 months old. With baby sister coming next month I am starting to prepare for how I plan to feed her. Thanks to Walmart’s amazing baby selection I am all ready to go when she gets here! This time around, since my hands are already full with her big brother, I plan to pump and feed bottles of breastmilk and formula from the very beginning. This is all new territory for me since I am only familiar with breastfeeding. Lawson NEVER took a bottle!! I am going to share all of the essentials that I purchased from Walmart so that we have everything prepared before she arrives. Scroll below to shop my picks! Shop Walmart’s baby selection at amazing prices HERE! This post is in collaboration with Walmart – all products were purchased by me and I am sharing my honest thoughts. This post also contains affiliate links – thank you so much for supporting The Blooming Nest!

This post is not sponsored in any way. The stroller was purchased with our own money, and these are my original thoughts. When I was pregnant with our first, I felt so overwhelmed by the amount of products we needed to register for, that I didn’t do enough research on what stroller would be best for me! I ended up just getting the first stroller that the lady working at Buy Buy Baby suggested (Baby Jogger City Mini GT). This stroller was great and had a lot of good features, BUT there were a lot of things about it that didn’t fit well with my lifestyle. Now that we are expecting baby number 2 in just a few weeks, I decided it was worth the money to buy a stroller that would really fit my needs as a work-at-home mama! Things I was looking for in a new stroller: Lightweight Narrow width for shopping trips 😉 Easy to fold up Lots of storage underneath After doing research and talking to my Instagram followers (friends), I knew Uppababy was the answer! Next, I had to decide which stroller best fit our family. This was the hardest decision. Uppababy also makes a stroller, called the Vista, that is larger and has the option for two seats! I went back and forth on this decision so many times, but ultimately decided that I would rather have the smaller/lighter stroller with one seat since Lawson is going to be 3 when baby sister arrives, and he is a big boy! Most of the time he walks with me when we go shopping now anyways. The biggest deciding factor for this was when I compared the width of the Vista to my current Baby Jogger. It was just as wide, and I was really wanting something more compact. BUT, if you are reading this trying to decided which stroller to buy for your growing family, and you plan to have kids close together, the Vista is the way to go!! I would have gotten it FOR SURE if we were planning to have more children in the future. I’ve been using our new Cruz with my 2 year old for a couple of weeks now, and I love it so so much! It is super easy to fold up and store in my trunk (I can even do it 9 months pregnant). I love how much space there is for storage underneath; I can fit my large diaper backpack AND shopping bags!! I love how easy it is to set the brakes and to flip the seat around so Lawson can face me. We plan to buy the Uppababy Mesa carseat for when baby sister is here, and it attaches to the stroller base without adaptors. It is so easy! I love how convenient this stroller is and I wish I had done my research in the past so we could have been using it from the very beginning. Shop The Post Below

As we are preparing for our sweet baby girl to arrive I have been slowly gathering necessities to pack for our hospital stay. With our first, Lawson, I really didn’t use much from what I packed at all! The only thing we really wished we had more of was snacks! ha! I say that so that if you are a first time mom worried that you will forget something important, don’t!! The hospital seriously provides everything you need and more. But it is nice to have a few things to make your stay more comfortable. I asked my friends (followers) on Instagram what the one thing they were so happy they had packed in their hospital bag was and I got some amazing responses. I wrote down the top 10 most suggested things to share with you so you can reference back as you start to pack your bag! Don’t forget to follow me on instagram for more baby content! There are a lot of videos/product links saved in my highlights there (@thebloomingnest). My Follower’s top suggestions: Robe Chapstick Extra long phone charger Your own shampoo/conditioner etc. Snacks Flip flops for the shower Womens diapers (depends) Your own pillow/blanket Money for vending machine Boppy if you are having a c-section to hold around your waist Notice how all of the items are for mom and dad and not for baby! ha! The hospital seriously provides everything for baby, so you don’t have to worry about packing much. Below I am going to list exactly what is in my bag and link it up for you! For mama: comfy t-shirt dress (if you plan to nurse you will want one with buttons) large soft cardigan instead of a robe short pajama set “throw away” slippers flip flops for the shower nursing bras bathroom necessities: shampoo/conditioner, deodorant, contacts, glasses, body wash, toothbrush/paste, cleansing wipes blanket/pillow makeup/chapstick hair ties and a headband depends/granny panties long phone charger For baby: newborn size sleepers (magnetic or zip up) bottles if you have a preference bottle soap if not breastfeeding hatch baby noise maker Ollie swaddle bows for photos (YAY I am having a girl!!) Cute blanket for photos wubanub/pacifier

When my mom decided she wanted to make her playroom closet into a little nursery for the grandkids, I knew I wanted to help!! We wanted to make it feel cute and complete without doing or spending too much. I knew this would be the perfect place for a sponge accent wall like I had seen in my friend Jess’ home (www.carcabaroad.com). It’s like getting the look of wallpaper for a couple of dollars! Win!! We decided to leave the shelf in the closet and use it for baskets and decor so we chose to only do the sponge wall on the lower portion. I got my sister to help me! Supplies: sponges paint scissors paper plate or paint tray We started by cutting the shape that we wanted out of the sponge. This took us a couple of tries to get it right. I wanted a shape that resembled a simple flower. You can also choose to leave the sponge as is and use the side of it like Jess did in her daughters room (seen below). Jess Davis – www.carcabaroad.com Once we got the shape looking the way we liked, we poured some paint onto a paper plate. We used my very favorite paint color, Pigeon by Farrow and Ball. We decided to “eye ball” where to put each flower on the wall rather than measure or use a level, it worked great for us! But we were working in a small space. A large wall may be more difficult to keep straight. We just began placing the sponge on the wall in a pattern until we finished! Simple as that and the room was completely transformed. BEFORE AFTER

I am so excited to start this new blog series called “DIY – Dupe It Yourself” where I recreate things that I want to purchase but can’t justify the price! I have quite a long list of things I am hoping to recreate and I cant wait to take you along. In the future if you’re looking for a specific item that I have “DIY-ed” you can just search “Dupe It Yourself” on my blog and they will all pull up! My first project is a door mat inspired by this one from Anthropologie (seen below). It sells for $48. I love it so much but could not afford it! I was a little nervous to try this project because I felt like it had the potential to be a total fail, ha! Luckily my aunt and cousin were able to help me and I owe the success of this project to them. What you’ll need: plain door mat (the one I used is linked below) painters tape craft paint sponges foam brush BEFORE First thing we did was used the painters tape to cut out the letters. We made sure to round out the edges. I prefer Frog Tape brand. I find that is sticks better. Next, we used a foam brush to outline the “tape letters” with white paint. I cut the tip off of it so that it would be more stiff. It worked great! For the “O,” it would have been too difficult to shape it with tape so we cut it out of paper and then held it down with push pins. I made sure to do two coats of this white paint before removing the tape. Now it was time to cut out the fun shapes! We chose to do four different flower shapes in four different colors. These are the shapes we ended up using. We cut them out of paper first and then out of the sponge. Then we got to start stamping!! We poured the paint onto paper plates so it was easy to dip the sponges in. It worked best when you got the sponges full of a lot of paint! We also made sure that some of our flowers were going off of the rug, if that makes sense. After we had filled up the rug with the flower “stamps” we cut some of them in half so that we could put some closer to the letters. We also cut out leaf shapes and filled in with green leaves all in between the flowers. This part was the finishing touch it needed!! I forgot to take a photo of the leaf sponge, sorry!! DONE What do you think? I think it turned out great!! Mine cost $20 to make and I think I love it more than the inspo! I only had to pay for the rug since I had the other supplies on hand, and I am pretty sure you can find plain door mats even cheaper than what I paid. Don’t forget, I hangout on Instagram a lot and you can usually find video tutorials of my projects over there! Follow along @thebloomingnest See you next time!!

I was so excited when Lawson told me he wanted his room to be “beach” themed. He literally asks to go to the beach every single day! I love that about him. I knew that I wanted to try out skinny lap in his room. I had a feeling I would love it because it was created by Joanna Gaines herself 😉 It ended up being a fairly easy project and is going to make such a big impact in his room. What You’ll Need: clear pine 1×2’s nail gun level scrap wood piece that is your ceiling height popsicle stick or some sort of “spacer” Here is our big load of 1×2’s. I will link the exact ones we used below. The longest length they sell them is 8′ so we decided to make our skinny lap wall the width of half of a board, 4 feet, so that we could get two boards out of one! We started by cutting each board in half so that they were all exactly 4 feet long. You want to make sure that all of your boards are exactly the same length and don’t vary at all. Then we used a scrap 1×5 we had in the garage to act as a guide for the skinny lap. We placed it vertically on the wall where we wanted the ends of our shiplap to be. We made sure it was level and then nailed it up. We placed the first 1×2 directly on top of our baseboard and also butted up against to our wood guide that we had already nailed up. We nailed this board in place. Then you place your “spacer” (we used a triangle we had in the garage because we liked the width. You can use popsicle sticks or whatever is easiest!), on top of your board and then your next board and nail it in. Repeat this process until the whole wall is done. *we did have an outlet that we had to go around but I didn’t take photos of that process. It is the same way we deal with outlets when doing board and batten or regular shiplap and I am going to save a video tutorial of that in my highlights on my secondary instagram @behind.thebloomingnest. And DONE!! Come back soon for a reveal of Lawson’s room when I have it fully decorated. And don’t forget that I usually hangout on Instagram and you can find video tutorials of my projects there (@thebloomingnest). *our headboard is offcentered for a few reasons.. One because we plan to do a barn door on the left side of his closet door and will need a little extra space for the bracket, two, because I like his bed closer to the wall on the right, and three because I am wanting to set a small stool next to his bed on the left side to act as a nightstand. See you soon! Regan

I am pretty confident when I say our half bath started out as the ugliest room in our house and ended up the cutest!! Since it is such a small space, I got to focus on every little detail, and I cannot believe the transformation! From floors, to walls, to lighting, it is a completely different room, and all on a budget!! BEFORE Here is the before…. So boring and builder grade. I bought the mirror when we first moved in hoping we would redo it soon. But, it kept getting pushed to the bottom of the list and then when the time came to do the bathroom, I didn’t want to use the mirror anymore, ha! The first thing we did was remove the pedestal sink! I was so glad to see it go! When we started this project, I planned to put wallpaper on the wall behind the sink. I am so glad that I changed my mind and came up with this shiplap pattern. It turned out so cute! We did small pieces of shiplap vertically and then 1×4’s in between. We decided on the color Sea Salt by Sherwin Williams. I love the coastal vibe it gives off. Next thing to tackle was the ugly tile floors! I used Rustoleum Rock Solid floor paint, like I had previously used in the kids’ bathroom. I did one coat of white and then used the stencil in the color oyster shell. You can find a video tutorial of this project in my Instagram highlights @thebloomingnest. I will also link everything used below! When the mirror I ordered for the bathroom came in and was waaaaay too small, I decided to use an extra mirror that I used before in my bedroom. The size and shape was perfect but I did decided to sand down the wood to take the stain off. The natural wood ended up looking great!! We found the white vanity for a great price at Ikea! It’s called hemnes, and it came with the sink, although you have to mount it to the cabinet yourself! I added some cute hardware to make it look more unique. I love the size of it and how much storage it added to our tiny space. It’s pretty funny that I waited so long to tackle this room since it’s one of the main rooms guests see when they come over. I am so glad they have a pretty and comforting space to use the restroom now 😉 For more details and video tutorials of this project, follow along @thebloomingnest on Instagram! See you there!

I love decorating tiny spaces, and I was so excited to tackle our “potty closet” in 24 hours!! We started on the evening of our 5th wedding anniversary. Are there any other weirdos out there who choose to DIY together for a date? ha! It’s our favorite way to spend time together! Below is a photo of the before. We just had new tile installed the week before, which already helped out the space so much! But, I thought it would be so fun to make this space cute, after all, we do spend some time in there each day! haha We began by painting the back wall in my VERY favorite paint color- Pigeon by Farrow and Ball. Then we built a 5 minute floating shelf! You can find a video tutorial of the shelf on our second instagram account: @behind.thebloomingnest. I stained it and then added some decor! While we were out picking up my art prints from Walgreens, I ran in Target and grabbed a pack of regular sponges and decided to do sponge accent walls on the side walls. I totally just winged this, and it ended up turning out great. I have a sponge wall blog post of another project I did which you can find here. …and it turned out like this!! A few people were asking why there isn’t a sink in this “potty closet.” This closet is a part of our master bathroom, which is next on the to-do list! Stay tuned!! Don’t forget you can always find more details and videos of projects we are working on over on my instagram: @thebloomingnest. See you over there!

We have the infamous “boob” lights in every single one of our bedrooms. I have wanted to replace them since we moved in so I plan to tackle one room at a time. Since we have so many to replace, I did not feel like spending $250 on a light for Brenan’s room. So I decided to Dupe It!! Keep reading to see how easy it was and what a big difference it made. Before – Boob Light Anthropologie Flush Mount – $250 Super cute huh!? I love how feminine it is. I knew it would fit perfectly in Brenan’s floral nursery. Let’s get started!! What you’ll need: Flush Mount Light Metal Flashing Gold Spray Paint Scissors We began by using a small pot to trace a circle on the metal flashing that was a little smaller than the size of the new light fixture. Then, we used a plate that was about an inch larger in diameter and traced that. Next, find something that is a small circle, (I used one of lawson’s sippy cups) and begin tracing small circles around the edges. I set the cup right on the edge of the inside circle every time to make sure they were all even. Once you have your shape drawn, it is time to cut! This metal flashing was super easy to cut with a normal pair of scissors. I started with a large pair but ended up using a small pair because they were easier to work with. Cut the inside circle out and around each “scallop.” Take your flower shape and your new light fixture outside and spray paint them! We used the color Rustoleum Sunlit Brass. We did two quick coats and let them dry. Follow the instructions that come with the new light fixture on installation and just drop on your gold flower before attaching the white glass cover. Including spray paint this project will cost you $37!! Make sure to tag me on Instagram if you recreate this @thebloomingnest!

I am still in shock that we were able to pull this off! There’s nothing you can’t do with a little bit of motivation and a quick google search. We decided to build a chair inspired by the Cosette Chair from Mcgee & Co. which sells for around $1,300! We thought it would be a fun challenge to learn how to weave! What You’ll Need: Natural Rush – We ordered THIS kind and ended up needing 5 rolls. 3 Yellow Pine 2x6x8s Clear pine 2x2x8 Clear Pine 1×3 Clamps Impact Driver Screws Right angle brackets x2 corner brackets x2 We began by ripping the 2×6’s in half so that our chair arms wouldn’t be so bulky. Ripping 2x6s also gives you straighter boards and edges versus buying 2x3s. Then we cut those ripped boards into 8 different pieces. You will need 4 that are 34 15/16″ long and 4 that are 23 1/2″ long. We used a square clamp to make sure the corners were perfectly square, and then assembled 2 rectangles that would act as the chair base (arms/legs). The longer pieces make the top and the bottom of the rectangle and the shorter pieces make the front and back. Next, you will attach a 1×3 across the front of the chair. We decided on placing it 14 5/8″ from the ground and it is 27 5/8″ long. Then, across the back you will place a 2×2 which will hold the back of the chair seat in place. The 2×2 is 2 7/8″ from the back of the chair and is the same length as the 1×3. (*2×2 not pictured because we originally did a 1×2 there and changed it later) One thing to note, we used two additional 1×2’s that were also 27 5/8″ long to help hold together the bottom of the base as we were building and staining and then removed them at the end once the seat was installed. Next, we built the frame for the chair seat! We used 1×2’s. The bottom seat is 27 x 27″ (so you will need 2 27″ boards and 2 24″ boards to make the square) and the back of the seat is 27 x 19″ (so you will need 2 27″ boards and 2 16″ boards to make the rectangle). We made these by screwing them together with trim screws (use a 90 degree clamp to make sure it is square when assembling) and by using corner brackets on the front two corners of the seat and right angle brackets to hold the seat and back together. Make sure to leave a gap behind the seat so you have room to weave! Now time to weave! We were a little nervous about this part, but luckily I found a tutorial that helped us SO much. I will link it HERE. He is so great at explaining the weave, and we followed his tutorial to a tee for the bottom of the seat. We also ordered the natural rush that he sells, and it comes with a booklet tutorial with great and helpful photos that we followed as well. We are thankful we did the bottom of the seat first because it is a little easier giving you opportunity to learn. We weaved and weaved and weaved!!! And FINALLY we finished the seat portion of the chair!! Unlike the square bottom, the back of the seat is a rectangle, so we had to figure out how to make the weave work. We ended up following the same tutorial exactly but instead of doing a wrap all the way around each corner, we wrapped an extra time up and down before wrapping the top 2 corners. Wow that is hard to explain in words ha! We continued that until the exposed 1×2 sides were all the same length (measure as you weave). Then we began to weave as normal. We sanded the base and then we stained the arms/legs with my favorite wood stain – Behr Cordovan brown. Then, sanded a little more to make the stain look more worn in and to remove some of the yellow (from the yellow pine). We attached the chair seat to the base with screws. We made sure to open up a space in the weaving for the screw to go through making sure not to damage any of the rush. Once the screws were in place we spread the rush back out. This was probably one of the most challenging DIY’s we have completed. It took a lot of patience, unweaving when we messed up and re-reading the instructions, but I know you can do it too if you just put your mind to it!! Chair cost breakdown natural rush 5 rolls – $100 pine boards – around $30 brackets – $10 clamps – $25 sample of wood stain – $5 Probably 16 hours of work! (You might can do it a little quicker since you have this tutorial to follow along now!) Brett wanted me to add that you could probably buy all of the above and a new miter saw, table saw, sander and impact driver, and it would still cost less than the chair we duped. haha! Total: $170 Shop The Space!