Building a Nursery

Planning. Shopping. Building. Organizing. All essential to designing a proper nursery. We had a lot of work and research to do, since it turned out that we would be welcoming 7 new members to our N1109 family.

You read that correctly...SEVEN. SEVEN BABIES.

Baby plants that is.

Ha HA! Gotcha! Get it? Babies live in nurseries...plants live in nurseries...baby plants...oh goodness I crack myself up sometimes.

Okay, let's face it, even I have to admit the cheesiness of that introduction and the lack of cracking myself up. But it was still fun, and I just couldn't resist. And this weekend we did in fact welcome seven new plant friends into our borderline urban/suburban home.

Saturday afternoon Maura and I got back from our respective activities and were trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the day. She was feeling crafty and I was totally game, but we just weren't feeling inspired. We sat at the kitchen table, each gazing into our laptops, begging Pinterest to give us a fun, crafty idea that we could finish in a few hours. An hour and two chocolate milkshakes later, we still had nothing.

Then out of the blue...herbs! Let's grow herbs! I don't remember who came up with the idea at the time or how we agreed to pursue this particular project, but we both decided that we really wanted to try and grow herbs in our 11th floor, downtown Rockville apartment. After all, we all cook with them enough, why not? After a bit more online price-checking, it was time to begin our mission. THE mission. Soon we were in the car and on the road to stop number one: IKEA.

Yes, I said IKEA. Before we could buy the herbs we had to be sure we had a place to put them. C'mon people, keep up with me here.

I have to admit, I have actually never been to IKEA before (strange, I know, but true). And may I just say, that place is HUGE. It was fun at first, winding through the pathways and seeing all the fun furniture, but after a while it got a bit overwhelming and claustrophobic - even more so with all the Saturday afternoon idiots wandering around. We weren't having much luck finding a suitable and affordable table for our babies, either.

Then, ironically enough, we stumbled across a well-priced baby changing table that would have served our purposes wonderfully. I actually thought it would be pretty awesome slash hilarious, having a changing table as a plant nursery. But just then, Maura found a nice looking shelf that seemed like an even more perfect fit that we just couldn't say no to - of course, she found it on her phone and it was at Target. So, after driving 30 minutes to get there and wandering around for almost an hour, we left IKEA empty-handed and headed back to our own neighborhood to buy our shelf.

Next stop was Home Depot (side note - I can't help but laugh about being excited to go to Home Depot - my dad dragged me there countless times as a child and I absolutely despised that store. Now I was happily prancing in to buy plants). We wandered shyly into the nursery, not too sure about what we were getting ourselves into. We gathered a handful of herbs that we thought we might use the most and Maura bought some seeds for some extra flowers. After grabbing all the necessary pots and soil  (which turned out to be for "in-ground" use - oh well, we'll see how that turns out) and nervously telling a store employee that we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, we checked out and rolled our new family members to the car.

Both of us were oddly terrified as we walked out of that store:

"I hope we don't kill them all"
"What are we getting ourselves into??"
"OMG WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WE ARE DOING"

Clearly neither of us are ready for human babies yet.

After picking up Chinese food and bubble tea, we came back to the apartment and built our shelf/nursery/plant holder. We then proceeded to make a mess in our kitchen as we attempted to put our little babies in their new beds A.K.A. pots.

"Need some more dirt?"
"Is this enough dirt?"
"This dirt is getting everywhere."

Dirt. Not soil. Not possibly the wrong soil. Just dirt. Two giant green thumbs right here. It was awesome :)

This is how the final set-up turned out:

We plan to fill all those shelves soon. And that black trash bag is holding the bag of dirt.

It's only been a few days, but I'll let you know how our babies are doing as they hopefully grow and don't die!

Side note 2: We actually have eight plants total now. My Opa saw my apartment for the first time and brought me a lovely orchid. Our family just keeps growing!