The Nursery - Before & After
Our baby's nursery is just a closet. Second child problems, am I right?
To view Cam's nursery, please enjoy this old blog post from when my husband decorated the nursery.
Well, that's my preview of our nursery closet! I really love this minimal space and am so pleased with how it turned out! :)
I was originally half-joking about putting our daughter's nursery in the closet, but Brian actually thought it was a good idea. It makes the most sense for our current lifestyle. While we technically have a 4-bedroom house, one of the bedrooms is used as an office and the other as a bonus room for Cam.
There's a TV in the bonus room with a nice Pottery Barn couch and most nights Cam is in there playing video games or watching a movie. Turning the bonus room into a nursery would have meant getting rid of the couch and TV that are used daily, since we don't have the space in our house to move them elsewhere.
So the baby can be in the closet for now, and when she is out of a crib in a couple of years, she can move into Cam's current bunk bed room. He will be 10 years old at that point, so we can then set up the bonus room into his big kid/teenage room.
Here is where we started with the closet:
It was basically a junk closet where anything random was stored. As you can see, I crammed in a lot of stuff into that small space, but once it was cleaned out, it looked like this:
I sketched out a very rough drawing of what I had in mind for the closet, and gave this to our handyman, Chris. He is a great builder and was able to execute on my plan with ease.
Some in-progress pictures:
All cleared out!
Once I was actually able to get the crib inside and see it together with the cubbies, I changed the layout and decided to turn the crib the other direction. In my sketch, I had originally thought I'd have the crib facing this way:
But the small space felt much larger when it was turned this direction:
The dogs are getting excited...to destroy any baby item they can get their paws on!
Most of the items I placed in the closet were items I already had, such as the wicker baskets, crib, and pictures. Once our baby girl is born, I'll change out some of the pictures on the top shelf to include her.
It took me about 3-4 weeks to slowly order things off of Amazon that I wanted to include. I knew I wanted a minimalist-look and my favorite decorating color is always shades of brown!
I ended up changing the lightbulb in the closet to a GE vintage-style Edison-bulb Warm Candlelight Glow, since the prior bulb was really bright. I wanted to keep this small space feeling cozy, and I thought ambient lighting would help.
The decision that took the longest was choosing string lights. I wasn't sure I wanted to add string lights, but I wanted something we could turn on at night without turning on the ceiling light in the closet. I was happy with my $10 Amazon string light purchase!
I bought a genuine Icelandic sheepskin rug off of Etsy, which was the biggest splurge, but still relatively inexpensive. I read that animal rugs can help babies be less prone to allergies and asthma (although I think our three shedding dogs will probably be the best defense) and I've always loved the look.
I have a wooden play gym that looks like this one in the picture below and figured I could eventually use the rug as a baby mat like this:
For cost transparency, excluding the renovation costs, I spent about $150 total on the nursery. This included a floor rug, sheepskin rug, string lights, lightbulb, storage bins, and crib mobile.
The last thing I did this week was move the storage bins to the top two rows. The first row contains one with diapers, one with diaper-related products (wipes, diaper trash bags, creams, etc) and one bin with lots of burb cloths and muslin blankets.
The middle row contains a bin with sleep sacks and two bins of newborn clothes. I figured it would be easier on us having the clothes higher for accessibility. The books and toys on the bottom are at baby-level.
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