baby's room: inspiration

Although lately I've been trying to do a lot of baby reading on important topics, such as approaches to sleeping, nursing, and brain development, designing the nursery has been a favorite pastime during down times at home since about halfway through my pregnancy. With 4.5 weeks to the due date, we still have a lot to do to make the baby's room ready. But we've gotten a lot of the major items together and have loads of ideas for the rest...choosing between them will be the difficult part (as will trying to keep the budget under control).

Early on, Jesse and I both started making design boards. We started with gray and yellow as our base colors, partly because the room will continue to serve as a guest room and we already had a gray futon with gray and yellow bedding. Our boards looked a little different – Jesse’s had a lot more burnt orange and turquoise and a little more of a 1970s vibe. I kind of like keeping the color scheme a little simpler. 

This is an extremely chaotic, early iteration of my design board, that has since been streamlined (click on it to make it bigger):

We wanted to have a mostly modern, graphic style with lots of colors and patterns that wasn’t too “baby,” but we also like to have mid-century, rustic, and whimsical elements as well. It might be a lot, but I’d love to incorporate maps and travel, woodland animals, Wisconsin and California, and typography, even if just in some small ways. I’d love to have some DIY elements too, to make it feel more personal.

With that as our direction, we’ve been browsing blogs and favorite shopping sites and coming up with lots of options for furniture, rugs, curtains, bedding, art, and accessories. We’re also trying to bargain-hunt. It’s taken a while, but we finally have the crib, the dresser/changing table, the glider, and the crib bedding (which we haven’t 100% decided to keep). A rug is on the way. I’ve slowly been picking up and ordering little accessories. Hopefully, in the next few weeks, it will all come together!