Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

If there is one thing that I know about babies, it's that they need to be changed. A lot. Sometimes you can go through 10 - 12 diapers in a day. That's a lot of pee and a lot of poop and potentially a lot of laundry. It also means a lot of time spent around the "changing area" that you've set up for your kid.

For some people this means a traditional change table - a very handy piece of furniture with room for a change pad, cubbies and baskets to hold diapers and supplies, drawers to tuck away clean clothes, etc.

Others prefer to use a regular chest of drawers and just attach a change pad on top. Most pads come with buckles and straps so they can be securely fastened to the chest, reducing the potential for the pad (and/or baby) to slip off mid-change. This is a great solution, since one day baby will be big enough and (hopefully) changes no longer necessary, but you'll still be able to use the drawers and won't need to get rid of a now useless piece of furniture.

Crown and I have a limited amount of space in our house, only two bedrooms, one of which used to be our office. The closet in the baby's room is going to be used partly for Daddy, partly for household storage. That means that most of Baby's clothing will need to be stored in a chest of drawers, a big one, too high to double as our change table. And we do not have room for both the drawers and a traditional change table. But what we do have is one of these: The Expedit bookcase from IKEA is positioned on its side (so long-ways, rather than tall) along one wall of the soon-to-be nursery. It's the perfect height for a change table, but unfortunately it is just an inch or two too narrow, standard change pads are between 16 and 17 inches wide, the shelf is only 15 inches.

Enter my stepfather and his newly acquired and increasingly useful hobby of woodworking. He has built many things for my sister and I by now, including some pretty fab flower boxes/privacy screens for my roof terrace, a project that nearly cost him several of his fingers, I kid you not. He offered to build us a tray that would be custom fit to slide securely onto the Expedit bookcase and hold a standard sized change table pad.

Here are some pictures of the finished project. I'll have to post pictures of the finished nursery so you can see how it fits onto the Expedit, but for now I'll just say that I think he may have stumbled onto a potential IKEA best-seller.