Baby's Nursery: Starting From Scratch

The nursery is the first room in our house that we are decorating from scratch. By that, I mean that we started with nothing to put in there – no furniture, no curtains, no wall decor – nada. The nursery is the smallest of our home’s three bedrooms, which is an 8′ by 10.5′ space. It’s certainly not closet-sized, but we’ve already encountered some limitations with furniture arrangements due to the window, heating vent, and the closet. My husband has been doing some minor renovations, and I’ve been working on a bunch of DIY decorating projects. I thought I’d give you a few peeks into what we’ve been working on!

Even though we are hoping to find out the baby’s gender at our ultrasound in less than a week, we do not plan on splashing pink or blue all over everything as soon as we find out. Our goal is to create a cheerful, gender-neutral space that will hopefully be able to be used by multiple kiddos. We are working with a modest budget, and are planning on incorporating a lot of handmade touches and secondhand finds into baby’s space.

This is a photo I took of the room destined to be the nursery, before we moved in almost a year ago. The previous home owner was essentially living out of this one room of the house – super cramped.

This is the same room once it was emptied – sorry for the kinda dark, kinda blurry photo. The walls were an off-white or ivory.

We Freecycled the yucky vinyl window quilt and the shelving unit to the left of the window. We painted the walls a soft gray, which has some blue undertones. The color is Voyage by Valspar in an eggshell finish. When we moved in, we hoped that sooner or later we would be using this room as a nursery, so we intentionally chose a wall color that we would want to use for a baby’s room. My husband used this room as an office before we found out we were expecting.

We painted all of the trim ultra-white (except for the window, which we are planning on replacing). We also swapped out all of the bisque-colored outlets for white ones (not yet installed in these photos).

My husband installed crown molding around the room, which I think added a very nice, crisp element to this space. After that was installed, I got to work on my first sewing project for the nursery – curtains! You might recognize the fabric I used for these curtains from my blog header, haha.

I’m head over heels for anything in a chevron print, so I knew I wanted to somehow incorporate that pattern into the nursery. After seeing similar examples here and here, I ultimately decided to make my own curtains using a vibrant white and yellow chevron fabric that I purchased here. I am thrilled with how they turned out!

One other DIY project I tackled for the nursery was creating some wall art. I found this awesome bird paper in the gift wrap section of a local stationary store. It was the kind they sell per sheet, rather than on a roll. I cut the wrapping paper to fit a white frame that I already had, and for around $3 I had a fancy new piece of art! I love how complimentary the bird print and curtains are to each other – lots of cheery yellow!

For those who are interested, this bird wrapping paper is produced by Paper Source, and can be found online here.

Putting together a non-cliche nursery on a budget has been an exciting and rewarding project so far. I’ll continue to share more updates as the nursery progresses – I have a ton of projects up my sleeve!

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