Baby's room is finally ready

As Benjamin still uses his crib and we are in no hurry to get him out of it and into a real bed, we found a crib for the baby last summer in a second hand shop.


We technically have six bedrooms in our house, which one might think would be more than enough for a family with one, soon to be two, children. In fact, the previous owners had some trouble selling the house because most French people don't know what to do with all that space. Using space is no problem for us, so we easily found a use for all of the rooms as soon as we moved in (1: guestroom, 2: office, 3: our room, 4: Benjamin's room, 5: exercise room/closet, 6: hobby room), so we had to do some shuffling to make room for the new baby. We combined the exercise room & hobby room and the new baby gets the room next to Benjamin's.

Then the baby furniture saga began...
We don't have closets in our house, so we needed a dresser and/or wardrobe for the baby's room. Our main choices here were either real wood furniture or particle board furniture. We opted for real wood when we bought our bed & nightstands, but had several issues with it and in the end had to send back 2 beds and pick pieces from numbers 2 and 3 to make one bed that had non-damaged parts. On the other hand, the particle board furniture doesn't last very long.

So for this baby, we again chose real wood furniture. And like dummies, we chose it from the same line that our bed came from. It took two weeks for the furniture to arrive. We expected to spend a morning putting both the dresser and wardrobe together, but we calculated without the extra time spent keeping Benjamin out from under our feet and without realizing that this furniture had even more steps to go through to put it together than Ikea furniture. Quite a feat, I'm sure you'll agree.

The wardrobe went together without too much trouble, except that the doors closed inwards instead of being flush with the front of the wardrobe, and one of the drawers was not straight. Frederic managed to add a very large number of washers inside the doors to make them close correctly, and sanded down one side of the drawer runners so the drawer would hang straight. No big deal, right?


The dresser, on the other hand, proved a bit more difficult. When we opened the box, we noticed that the dresser top had obviously been sitting in a warehouse for too long; the paint was chipped & peeling off of the top. Still, we thought, after all we went through with the bed to finally get a decent one, we'll just live with that. So we started to put it together. But when all but one drawer was assembled, we discovered that the drawer in question had 2 left sides. It was impossible to just reverse one side.

To send the furniture back meant disassembling everything and putting it back in the box. We hoped to get around this by having them deliver the new dresser first, and sending back the old one later (as happened with our bed). That way we could just take off the top and take the new top from the new dresser.

However, when Frederic called the company, they imparted the very unwelcome news that they no longer carried the dresser at all (even though it appeared in their 2008 spring/summer catalog!) and had no stock to exchange it with, and would not order any more. So our options were to send it back and get our money back (and leave us having to find another dresser, imagining that even if we found another we liked, it would take another 2 weeks to ship and we could have similar problems with it too), or we could find a woodworker to make the right side of the drawer and send the company the bill.

In the end, we chose the "neither" option. Frederic found a way to assemble the drawer slightly differently, to save us the headaches associated with options 1 or 2.


So after all that, the baby's room is now finally ready! Well... almost. The skylight pane is cracked all the way across, and it would be wonderful to get that replaced before the baby arrives... given that we probably only have 2-3 weeks left, it's unlikely that that will happen in time. But we can always hope, right?