The nursery is under way!

The floor is D-O-N-E! The house (though not the nursery itself) is smell-free, and we are back in our space (a day earlier than planned)! Love hanging out with my mom a bunch, but it's sooooooooo nice to be home. 

Brad snapped these pics in imperfect lighting, so they're not 100% accurate representations of the redone floor; the huge improvement is, however, still noticeable, and once we're able to move some furniture in there, I'll hopefully be able to get some great shots. 

Speaking of furniture: I ordered the crib tonight! 

From the beginning, I've had my eye on a Jenny Lind crib. I love the old-fashioned spindle look, and the style is timeless and simple without being dated and boring. As another benefit, several brands make Jenny Lind, and they're all relatively reasonably priced as far as cribs go. 

We got the DaVinci Jenny Lind stationary side crib in white through Amazon. DaVinci is one of the better brands that makes the Jenny Lind style (though they all seem to get generally good reviews), and while it's normally about $200, it was discounted on Amazon to $150 with free shipping. I was beginning to doubt that we'd be able to avoid paying $25 or more for shipping - which was infuriating and totally not my style - and I couldn't find it in a conveniently located brick-and-mortar, so the free shipping was a major score. 

Why not a secondhand crib? This was a decision that Brad and I spent a lot of time discussing and researching, and I'm glad we did. My original plan was to buy a crib secondhand on Craigslist - as is my general trend whenever possible. I searched for months and months for a Jenny Lind, and I found a few within a reasonable distance. They were all drop-side, though, which meant they would require a repair kit (to make them stationary) from the manufacturer given that drop-side cribs went through major recalls in 2010 due to injuries to babies. In the midst of this search, one of my older sisters offered me her children's old crib, and when I learned that it was a Jenny Lind, I was like, YES! 

But upon researching, I found out that the manufacturer had gone out of business and thus there was no repair kit for her crib. And after reading that site, I started reading another about the not-so-great aspects of secondhand cribs, especially older and drop-side cribs. The more a crib is put together and then taken apart (like, for a second or third child), the looser the hardware becomes and the more likely that hardware pieces go missing. With a drop-side that's been "repaired" to be stationary, this is especially problematic, as the side may not be as stationary as it's supposed to be. 

In general, the recommendation is to not use a crib older than 10 years old b/c safety features change so much over time. But even for those newer drop-side cribs that I could've found through Craigslist, there was a distinct chance that the crib had been dis- and re-assembled one too many times to be ideal. 

Ultimately, it's a risk I didn't want to take, and Brad couldn't have agreed more. There are a lot of ways we're saving with this nursery - we got a steal of a rocker, we did most of the floors ourselves (okay - "themselves"), we bought a vintage dresser ($25!) that we'll paint and use as a changing table, etc. But when it comes to issues of safety, the extra $75 for a new crib is more than worth it, especially when you think of all the many many hours baby will spend sleeping in that crib over the next couple of years.