Nursery/Toddler room time

If you are reading this in a reader, please ‘pop’ this out and comment! It’s National De-lurking week and I NEED HELP! De-lurk and be generous with your brains at the same time. I need ideas!

Well, we are just a few days away from breaking ground and a few weeks away from house beginning to ending! This means we have to start thinking about furniture, decorating, and Keeley’s room.

Not that we will be able to buy furniture or decorations any time in the near future, but we REALLY have to do something with Keeley’s room, a nice paint color if nothing else. I’ve been checking out things online, little toys that could be sewn for not much money, that might add to a theme like ‘owls’ or ‘woodland creatures’ or just ‘animals’. How long is a nursery a nursery, as long as you want or by the time a baby toddles around it’s now just a ‘room’?

We do have a quilt made by a church member that we can hang on the wall if we’re sticking with ‘nursery’ for a while, and worry about a big kid theme/ non-theme later. It has shades of yellow in it and would take up enough of one wall to be the main ‘part’ of the room. With a few other accessories, it would be enough to ‘do’ a room I guess. If you can tell it’s Hey Diddle Diddle nursery rhyme. Previously I found some ideas for using fuseable felt and putting simple decorations on pre-made pillows or making small pillows for like the cow jumping over the moon or the dog laughing, etc. I kept hoping that we’d have a chance to do a real nursery for her, but it looks like that window is closing, and I wonder if we should just skip to the big kid part, or wait and use big kid stuff for when/if she has a sibling, we could move her to an upstairs bedroom and make it really nice and grown-up instead of nursery like. We have a whole section in her baby book waiting for her ‘real’ room to be ready to fill in what her nursery looks like, etc. Since we’ve lived in about 12 places, I don’t want those to be the memory in her book, but her ‘real’ room instead.

Favorite wall colors would be a shade of yellow for a nursery or orange for a big kid room and themes of any kind that aren’t ‘princess’ or ‘insert character here’ is what we are leaning towards.  We can’t afford $50 accessories or anything from a specialty store, just basics.

In doing a big kid room, one thought would be for a toddler/twin bed to just use a solid colored bedding and get patterned sheets, or a comforter that reverses so if she gets tired of one color (or I do) we can flip it over for a different look/feel without changing too much else. Finding things to coordinate and ‘go’ is the issue. Plenty of princess stuff, Cars stuff, etc, but nothing plain until you get up to ‘college’ type of ideas, which is okay, as the accessories that go with the college stuff would be usable for many years and you could change the look fairly easily using reversible items, rotating cheap printed pillow or toys and etc.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. I’ve ogled the owl printed stuff at Target and Pottery Barn Kids, but it’s just too much of an outlay right now, and of course when we can afford it/would be able to use it, well it won’t be there anymore and it will be something else available. I don’t see much point in spending $100’s on stuff (like $30 for a stuffed owl from PBK, or $120 on a dust ruffle), that you kid may outgrow. I’d like something that lasts a long time and can grow with her, for a big kid room.

If we are able to do a nursery at her age for her downstairs bedroom, which would be a continuing nursery if needed or eventually an office, nothing would have to ‘grow’ with her, but if some of it could transition over to a big kid room, that would rock! Also looking for specific organizational ideas. She doesn’t have many toys right now (all the baby ones we put up because they just made a mess and she didn’t really want to play with them), the toys she does have reside in a small corner of the living room and a desk drawer, and that’s about it. Her upstairs room will have a dormer and we plan on building in a window seat with storage for bedding/toys/etc. The downstairs room is about 8×10 with one window, pretty small, but enough for the purpose for now.