Nursery
Buy and sell cribs and nursery furniture in Guatemala.
In Guatemala a crib is as likely to come from a local carpenter’s workshop, built to order in pine or a harder local wood, as from a box with an imported convertible inside, and the two rarely take the same mattress. Both turn up new and pre-owned, often next to a chest of drawers with a changing tray on top and the folding playard that kept the baby in the parents’ room for the first months, passed on by families taking a nursery apart once the youngest has moved to a bed. Before anything else, measure the base the mattress rests on: that one figure decides what fits.
The crib sets the size of everything else in the room:
the mattress, the fitted sheets and the small bed it may later turn into all follow from it. A full-size crib with an adjustable base drops lower as the baby learns to stand, and convertible models lose a side to become a first bed, so some families never need a separate toddler bed. A bassinet or a folding playard is the short-term answer: either one fits beside the parents’ bed and goes to the grandparents’ house for the weekend, but stops being enough once the baby sits up and hauls on the sides. Around the crib, nursery furniture is mostly a chest of drawers and a wardrobe, while baby bedding and nursery decor are the quick part of the room to change later.
Carpenter-made cribs and the mattress that has to fit them:
a crib built to order can be sized to a small room and made in the wood you choose, but it is built to whatever measurements the carpenter was given, not to a mattress standard. Boxed imports follow either the larger American size or the smaller European one, and both circulate here. So settle the crib mattress before the crib: measure inside the frame where the mattress sits and choose one that fills it, with no gap along the sides you could push two fingers into. Firm and flat beats soft and thick. Pine is light and affordable but soft, and its screw holes wear loose after a few rebuilds; cedar and the denser local hardwoods are harder and hold a bolt far longer.
The wood is what you pay for:
a folding playard runs from around Q700 to Q2,000 new, depending on whether it has a raised bassinet level, a changing tray and a mosquito net. An imported convertible crib in solid wood sits nearer Q3,000 to Q4,000. Used solid-wood cribs change hands for roughly Q1,000 to Q1,400, a steep cut for something that barely wears, and the reason is the work it hands the buyer: taking it apart, moving it, rebuilding it and, nearly always, buying a new mattress. A used playard holds its value worse than a wooden crib, because the fabric and the folding hinges are what wear, and they are all there is to it.
Signs of woodworm in a used crib:
small round holes in the wood with a little heap of fine powder below them mean wood-boring beetles are still at work. Termites leave mud trails and wood that sounds hollow when you knock on it. Ask to see the crib standing, then shake it by the top rail: the joints should not creak or rack, and every slat should be there, firm and close enough that a soda can will not pass between two of them. Walk away from any crib whose side slides down on a track, because that mechanism is the part that fails. Ask what paint went on any crib that has been repainted, and count the bolts against the holes. A mattress that dips in the middle or smells damp is not worth taking, whatever the crib is like.
A crib that leaves your house in pieces:
photograph it assembled, then close up on the joints and the base. Say what wood it is, whether a carpenter made it or it came boxed, the inside measurement where the mattress goes and whether it converts to a small bed with the parts to do it. Keep the bolts and the Allen key in one bag taped to the frame, and say whether the mattress goes with it and how old it is, since plenty of buyers want the crib alone. Someone coming from Jutiapa or Salamá will want to see the crib standing before you take it down, so leave it up for the visit and keep a screwdriver handy: flat, it fits in the back of a hired pickup and goes back together in minutes if the hardware is all there.