Our spare bedroom had been being used as a guest room/my office/my closet, but it was recently time to turn it into a nursery. Here are a few of the inspiration photos I pinned to my "nursery" board on Pinterest.
I love the brass accents and the rich danish wood.
Another calm, soothing space - love the grey and white.
Per usual, I wanted to be thrifty, didn't want to buy all new things, and was hoping to use some furniture that we already owned. Anytime I'm designing a space, I have to have a visual representation of my ideas so that I can see whether things will work together. I also made a little paper representation of the room and all the pieces of furniture that needed to fit so that I could move them around. Here's my first moodboard:
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As you can see from my inspiration photos, I liked the calmness of grey, white, and wood with touches of gold and thought I might add in some dark teal or navy. As we started to actually measure (it's a pretty small room) and think more logically about the layout, a lot changed.
- While the Eames (knockoff) rocker is perfect stylistically, it's obviously not that functional as a glider. We were given the advice that we'd really want a reclining glider for nights when the baby gets rocked to sleep and we don't want to disturb him by transferring him to the crib. If you think it's hard to find a cute, modern glider, add "reclining" into the mix and see how much harder it gets. We finally found this one on Overstock.com, which is comfy, and the lines are simpler than most.
- After adding a large chair into the room, there was no longer room for the daybed, which we use for guests. It got moved into my husband's studio (our third bedroom).
- The long, low Danish modern dresser, which we already own (similar to the picture above, that's obviously not ours), also wouldn't fit. We'll use instead a higher, narrow Danish modern dresser, which we also already own. We'll use the top of it as a changing table.
- For some weird reason, even though we were very undecided about having children for a long time, I had been collecting these vintage wooden rolling toys for years. I would pick them up whenever I saw one in a thrift store and I have about a dozen of them. I think they're so cute. I had this idea that I would display them (secured by museum glue) on a long IKEA Lack shelf above the crib. Well, I did until I started thinking about earthquakes. I decided I didn't want anything heavy above the crib, and there was no other good wall to put a long shelf on, so that idea got scrapped.
Other notes:
- In addition to the dresser, we already own the starburst, the gold dipped bowl, and the grey curtains.
- My sister is a saint and was willing to get us whatever we needed from IKEA in Atlanta, since we didn't forsee being able to take a trip to an IKEA anytime soon. Unfortunately, the crib we wanted (simple and affordable!) was out of stock for months there. Luckily, we found the exact crib for sale on Craigslist here in St. Louis.
- She was able to get us the pendant lamp we wanted, the Maskros, as well as the desk top and drawers we needed to make our new workspace. Just an FYI, if you're thinking about buying this lamp, we got the "small" version, and it's pretty huge.
- I couldn't commit to the rug, I was afraid that the darker color might darken the small room too much.
Here's what the moodboard looked like after all of this:
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Instead of displaying the toys on the long shelf, I bought this small IKEA Expedit shelf. The toys and books can go there for now, and I'm sure we'll need to add baskets for more storage soon. The lamp is just an inspiration - IRL, I took a silver and gold vase and added a lamp kit to it to make a metallic lamp. We still need a pouf or footrest of some kind, and a small rug. And just in case you think the room will be devoid of all color, I'm planning to frame some bright Charley Harper animal prints to go above the crib. In addition, my quilting genius of a mother-in-law is making us a crib quilt from this Michael Miller Waterfront fabric collection. How cute are these prints?
Here are a few peeks into the room so far, it's still not entirely done:
And our new workspace used to look like this...
And now looks like this...
Whew.