It took a little work, but we have obtained a dresser for the nursery!

Yesterday, we went to five consignment/vintage stores (Consigned Home Furnishings, Rerun, I Heart Retro, Shag, and Hawthorne Vintage). We didn't have any luck finding a dresser at those stores, but we did get a cute nightstand for me and a sweet mini credenza at Hawthorne Vintage. Both were priced reasonably, as far as I could tell. I love those little legs.

Just a note--for future Portland furniture shopping, I would skip Rerun and I Heart Retro. Rerun didn't have much furniture, and I Heart Retro's furniture seemed kind of run down (drawers didn't open smoothly, loose drawer pulls). But we didn't spend much time in there--maybe I missed some hidden gems.

Today, we visited Lounge Lizard and Look Modern, both of which had some good options. I love the furniture at Look Modern, but it is definitely more expensive than we're used to. They had a couple dressers for $500-$600, which I could almost justify paying (a new dresser from Land of Nod costs about that much), but the drawers were a little fussy, and it seemed kind of imprudent to have the nicest piece of furniture in the house be in our child's room. What if he drew on it with markers? I'd be sad. So we didn't buy the pretty dresser. Someday I would like to buy some furniture from Look Modern though.

Lounge Lizard had about four dressers that met our requirements, each in the $100-$150 range (much better!). We ended up getting a lime green changing table/dresser combo from the 80's (the woman who sold it to us was really nice and told us that she's a mom, and she'd checked to make sure it hadn't been recalled, so everything seems fine on that front). The drawers stick a little, but Patrick thinks he may be able to fix that, and if not, they work well enough. I'd definitely like to repaint it, if we have time.

Since we have most of our key nursery furniture now, I decided to spend some time thinking about the room layout. I started out using Google Sketchup, but it was too fancy for my purposes, so I went with graph paper and little scale representations of the furniture instead. Fun!

This one's my top choice. It puts the changing table by the door, keeps the crib away from the bookshelf, and still leaves a decent amount of space in the middle of the room for some sort of a rug for playing on. And there's room along the left-hand wall and in the closet for more storage in the future. The chair will prevent us from opening and closing the closet door a lot, but I think we'll just keep it open all the time, unless we want to make it look nice for company or something.

My plan right now is to move our IKEA Poang chair and ottoman into the nursery for seating, and then since I think we'll be spending more time downstairs than upstairs, we're going to set up a little nursery annex in our dining room with a glider (still need to get one of those), a rug, and maybe a second changing pad and diapering supplies on the mini credenza.

I realize all this careful planning will probably go out the window when the baby actually gets here, but it makes me feel better to have some sort of plan!