Our Nursery Design Process

I recently shared a bunch of mood boards for our nursery! It was so much fun brainstorming all of the possibilities for the room, and it really helped me explore what was out there and discover what my tastes were.

It’s a little weird to think that this room will be someone else’s soon—someone I haven’t even met yet!—and that in a few years, it will totally morph as that little someone starts expressing their own tastes and interests.

But for now, the room is how I’m introducing the baby to their world, and I want to make that introduction as amazing as possible.

In my next post, I’ll show the room reveal, but in this one I just want to talk about my initial ideas for it!

The Blank Slate

Here’s what we started out with, once we emptied out all of the guest room furniture. It’s hard to tell here, but the wall was actually a very light blueish grey. There are technically curtain rods on all of the three windows, but only one had a functional set of curtain hardware—there’s a tension rod in one window and in the last, the curtain is hooked into defunct hardware, and the curtain rod isn’t attached to anything, it’s just hanging in the curtain!

The one nursery item in this picture is the rug (the Sima Abalone from Ruggable in 8x10’ with the cushioned pad), which Chase bought for me for Valentine’s Day. We laid it out for a little over a day before rolling it back up for painting!

I think one thing that’s apparent in this picture, however, is how much natural light this room gets. It’s truly beautiful, especially in the afternoon when golden light dances through the trees outside the windows.

The Walls

One thing I knew I wanted in this room was a wall design—whether it be wallpaper or a mural or a stencil. I keep talking about it, but I really wanted this room to feel like a place for a child to let their imagination run wild. Here are some of the walls that really inspired me:

In the end, I decided to apply a wallpaper-look stencil to the walls. Stamping or stenciling a wall is something I’ve been wanting to try for a few years, and I thought it would probably be more durable, easier to fix, and cheaper than wallpaper, and easier to execute than a mural. I noticed a lot of the wallpapers I was drawn to had both animals and florals, so I tried finding stencils that included those features.

These were the finalists:


In the end, I decided the last stencil “Forest Pattern” by StencilRevolution was the one that best fit the vibe I was going for. I loved the animals featured and the flowers. If I had a ton of time and energy, or if I was only stenciling a small area, I might have stenciled the elements in different colors, to give it a more intricate look, but I decided that with such a big room and a baby on the way, creating the “perfect” faux wallpaper wasn’t going to be a great use of my time, so I decided to paint the stencil itself white and focus on a search for a good background color.

I used Pixlr and some rudimentary photo editing skills to erase the walls, add the wall stencil I had picked out, and try out a few different wall colors. After asking my husband for his opinion, we settled on a sagey color I pulled from the rug.

The Decor

After creating all of those themed nurseries, I realized I was loving the vibe of the whimsical nursery the most—a room with an English country home vibe, with a vintage feel and woodland creatures. I wanted to bring my adventures in England into my home and into my child’s life. I picked out my favorite furniture and decor items that fit that description—as well as incorporating some pieces I already owned, like the chair and the bookcase my dad made me—and used Canva to create a little collage of what the nursery might look like (uploading images of all of the products, removing their backgrounds, and “placing” them together in the room) .

I loved it all. The room felt absolutely perfect. I showed it to Chase, who approved the design, and went out in search of paint that evening, ready to start turning the design into reality!

That process ended up taking over two months, with a lot of twist and turns along the way! So, I’ll save that story for my next post.

Best,

Julia

Prior to the Blank Slate….

Just to embarrass myself, I’ll show you what we actually started with when we “started work” on the nursery back in January! We had some damage to our house from Hurricane Ida in August and had to empty out some rooms to get it fixed last fall. As a result, entire closets were piled into our guest room.

This first picture—where you can see the floor—isn’t even half as bad as it was back in December when we were getting the work done. With the little energy I had in my first trimester, I went through 50% of our possessions, filled bags with donation items and others with trash, and reorganized the rest as I put everything back where it belonged.

In late January, I finally finished getting the room back in order and by February 1st, it was in the “blank slate” state from the start of the blog.

Just looking at pictures of the state it was in stresses me out! It’s completely unrecognizable as the same room now.

What A Year! In Review

I had plans for 2020.

This time last year, I was just settling into a new job. I had just joined a D&D group that met every Tuesday, I was writing in coffee shops in the evenings, and my family and I were actively planning an international trip for the end of summer. I had tickets to see Anastasia: the Musical in April. On New Year’s, my boyfriend and I had started walking a few miles along the river to a main street, where we brunched or had drinks, and Ubered home. It was a great new tradition and we were excited to get rolling. I even bought an Instax camera that I could use to document days out.

Save for being an election year, it wasn’t set out to be a particularly usual or unusual.

Looking back, the only I can describe it is to say that it felt like things were smooth. Steady. Descriptors you can only really give in hindsight, once you’ve hit a particularly big bump in the road and those things you thought were rocks before? Mere pebbles.

We all know what the big bump in the road was. It has firmly cemented its chapter in future AP World History books.

For me, it meant that my mom was hospitalized in February, with a mystery illness that would only be diagnosed months later when doctors would admit that, yes, it was here that early.

I started working from home part time in March, and D&D, coffeeshops, and brunches swiftly became Before Time activities. They were replaced with Animal Crossing, new hobbies (painting and puzzles), and at home movie premieres. As you can see, Nim also tried out some new hobbies.

In early April, we celebrated Chase’s birthday with my best attempt at turning our porch into a fancy bistro. For our anniversary in May we visited a wildflower field. For my birthday in June, my best friend made us an amazing picnic in the park. This was perfect because cooking in June was impossible for us due to a kitchen reno (we discovered in April that once we were eating every meal at home, not having a dishwasher was no longer an option).

In July I finished the first draft of a novel I’d been working on and in August I got better at painting. In September, my mom was hospitalized again due to long-term COVID complications and while she was in the hospital, I helped her adopt a kitten. September is also when Chase and I went ring shopping…

BECAUSE IN OCTOBER WE GOT ENGAGED!!

Like many other couples, COVID and quarantine was a time of reflection.. of what we missed from before, of what we were currently grateful for, of the things we want to change, and of our goals for the future. And we decided that what we really wanted was to get married.

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Which brings me to 2021. I think we’re all past the point of looking to the future with any truly certain plans, but here are my personal goals for the next eleven months:

  • Finish the second draft of my novel from last year. I was really proud of the work I completed on it during the first half of the year, but nerves kept literally any progress from happening during the second half (and also maybe a lot of wedding planning). I want to see myself as a writer again and I want this project to reach its potential.

  • Continue painting! It was a hobby I took up specifically because of quarantine and I began with a paint-by-numbers set because I had no idea where else to start. Now I have multiple paint sets, a ton of canvases and watercolor paper, and several books with project ideas. I’m really proud of myself for growing a skillset from just about nothing last year, and I want to keep it up this year.

  • Get married! We have a venue booked and a date set for 10/10/2021. Plan A is to get married at a small ceremony with our parents and siblings in attendance at Forter Castle in Scotland. Obviously, international travel for fun isn’t currently a thing and there’s no telling when exactly it’ll happen again. Hopefully before 10/10. We recognize it may not. Which is why we have Plan B: get married in a small ceremony with our parents and siblings in attendance at our local courthouse, with a vow renewal in Scotland whenever it’s safe.

I hope you made it through 2020 okay—that you too were able to find some love and joy in all of the fear and sorrow. I doubt many of our plans remained untouched by the end of the year, but I hope that you are finding your bearings on your new path. Last of all, I hope that 2021 will be brighter for us all, and that by its end we’ll be hugging again.

I’d love to hear about your plans and goals for 2021 in the comments! Or if 2020 had any unexpectedly joyful turns for you, too.