Operation Nursery: An Oceanic FLOR

The moment the ultrasound tech told us Button is a girl, Jeff turned to me with one question: "Can we please still have an underwater nursery?" My answer? "Get designing, Boo!"

So, with the several weeks to plan, we've now got a lot of tricks up our sleeves--or at least we hope we do!--but this post will just focus on the first stage: our oceanic floor, care of the FLOR store. The basic idea of FLOR is that you can design your own unique rug made up of carpet squares. I first saw them featured on HGTV's Design Star and fell in love, and it didn't take long for me to convince Jeff this would be a good investment for the nursery. However, the color and design is all my husband's (with a little help from our FLOR consultant, of course)!

  

Once you've selected your FLOR tiles (which you can do in-store or online) from the variety of textures and colors available, they'll arrive at your house--care of free shipping!--in just a few days. Ours actually came last Wednesday, but we agreed to wait until Friday (when we'd both be home) to start the fun. Jeff was only too excited to begin!

Well, maybe a little too excited...

Now that we had that straightened out, we opened the three boxes and spread out our tiles in piles across the existing (laminate hardwood) floor.

One of the really neat things about FLOR is that it just goes on top of your existing flooring--no need for extra padding, mats, or finishes. That meant Jeff could get right to work (since I was relegated to supervision only, thanks to my growing belly).

See that sheet in Jeff's hand? That's the "pattern" (it's actually pretty random) that our FLOR consultant and Jeff worked out in store--we actually got a really cool lesson in color theory as they worked through it. Of course, that pattern isn't set in stone--we can try it out, mix and match, or even re-consult with the talented designers at FLOR if we decide we want to switch to a new color or alter the order in some way. For right now, though, we're really liking what we came up with in-store, so it only took about 15 minutes until we had achieved this transformation!

We have to say--we're pretty thrilled! It's achieved exactly what we were hoping it would--it's warmed up the room, deadened the sound, tied in our patchwork of wood tones from the furniture, and started our ocean from the bottom up. It's still not officially stuck together--we'll wait to do that until painting is finished--but we're in love!

Next up: Wavy Walls!