Everything's Coming Up Roses - Floral Nursery Inspiration
Guest Post by Dr. Kelsi Becker
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The entire journey from finding out you are carrying a child, to the delivery of that child is something I can’t quite put into words. The emotions of seeing that positive test, to hearing their heartbeat, to seeing their little profile, to finding out gender, decorating the nursery, and then to finally meeting that precious baby 9 months later have truly been the most amazing times of my life so far. Yes, about 1 Million decisions have to be made during that time, which can be stressful, but at the end of that 9-month marathon it’s all worth it!
My husband and I found out September 10, 2020 that we were pregnant. From there comes all the questions. Do we find out the sex? Do we wait? What names do you like for a girl? What names do you like for a boy? What do we do with our wild dogs? And so many more! I had always thought I wanted to wait and be surprised at birth to find out the sex of our child, but my husband was not a fan of that idea. He was too excited and wanted to find out the sex early. We went back and forth and came to an agreement that if we found out the sex of this child then we would wait and be surprised for the next child. For someone who wanted to wait and be surprised, I was pretty excited when we scheduled that 20-week anatomy scan where we were able to find out the sex of our child.
Going into the ultrasound we had decided that we would get the envelope and do some kind of celebration or reveal with our families. Well, once you have that envelope in your hands all plans and ideas leave your brain, and it takes all you have to even wait to get to the car to open it. Together, in the parking lot of my OB’s office, the two of us sat in my husband’s truck and opened that envelope to find out we were having a GIRL!!! I will never forget that moment and I don’t think any reveal could have topped that feeling in that exact moment.
We had names picked out for either sex, so the next big question and decision was the nursery. A little back story about our home, this house was (and still is) a fixer-upper that we had been working on for the past 5 years. Our extra bedroom had been turned into a lot of different spaces. My brother-in-law had lived in that room,. It was then a guest room/office. Then turned into a bedroom for my best friend. Then transformed into a dog room where we kept their crates. This room needed a lot of work and love to be made into the nursery that we had dreamed of for our sweet girl, Oaklyn.
We still think that had it not been for Oaklyn, that room would still be a hodgepodge of furniture, dog crates, and storage. When you have a baby, EVERYTHING in your life changes, but for the good! Since we found out the sex of the baby, we were able to customize and make that room very specific for our daughter (one of the perks of finding out the gender of the baby).
Before we got into the theme of our room, we wanted to get our furniture figured out. We are pretty frugal people and did not want to spend a ton of my money on new furniture for this room that would most likely not even be used by Oaklyn for the first 5 months of her life. We reused a lot of furniture that we had in the house. We also have no storage or space in our small house, so we had to be creative and smart about trying to create more space in each room. We decided to get two tall chests to be able to fit the bassinet in our bedroom. We then took my black Ikea dresser, which was a free Facebook marketplace find a few years ago, and painted it grey to match her room. A couple of coats later and it was perfect. We also decided to keep the queen size mattress in her room for when we have guest over to help keep an extra sleeping place in this small 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom house. After only 3 weeks of having her here with us, this bed has already been used and I am so happy with this decision to keep the bed!
Even before becoming pregnant, I had about 100 wood accent walls pinned on Pinterest for this spare room but had never executed the plan. So, when forced to redo this room I knew I had to have a wood accent wall. I went through many pictures and ideas before designing our own wood placement on the wall. We have no reason for the placement of the wood on the walls other than we thought it looked cool. There are a lot of tutorials on Pinterest to help with cuts, placement, and finishing. We used this Pin to figure out the basics of creating the wall and then went with our own design. After we created the wall, it was time to decide the color and décor of the room. I have always loved the color pink and knew I wanted some variation of pink in this room. The paint we chose was Glidden’s floral tapestry from Home depot. We wanted a pink that was not a light baby girl pink and also not a dark pink to make space feel smaller and this color checked both of those boxes. The other walls were painted a very light grey to make sure the space stayed bright and airy. We got extremely lucky and had a friend of a friend getting rid of a crib and mattress for FREE!!! Obviously, we had no say in color or look of the free crib, but we lucked out that this crib was beautiful and in perfect condition! If you can score a free crib and reuse an old dresser as your changing table, I highly recommend it, this left a lot of space on our registry to add some pricier items.
The last piece of furniture we have in this room is our rocker. I was set on have a comfy rocker that had an ottoman that rocked as well. I found this perfect grey rocker from buybuyBaby. This was the most expensive item on the registry, but it is worth it! Find a rocker that you love and add it to the registry, you would be surprised how many people love to go in on presents together to get you something nice!
All the little details came together with the room keeping a very lite feminine feel to all the floral nursery decor. The bedding I found on a random trip to Big Lots. The bed did not have a headboard and all the headboards I liked were very expensive, so I decided to create my own out-of-wall décor I found at Hobby Lobby (and obviously when they were 40% off). I loved this white-washed, floral, wood décor and decided to buy two pieces to create our faux headboard. The curtains came from Amazon which matched the tan/pink color in the comforter. I also found the rug on Amazon which matched the pink in the wall and helped incorporate the floral nursery decor. The ceiling light fixture is from Amazon, I have always loved chandeliers and found this perfect bohemian chandelier. We added the crib sheets and changing pad cover to our Amazon registry and received both as gifts at our showers. The wall flowers above the dresser were hand-made and gifted from a friend.
Elephants are my favorite animal and that is what my nursery theme was when I was born, so wanted to add an elephant picture or statue somewhere in this nursery. We found the perfect floral, pink, elephant picture at Hobby Lobby. The other sign in the room was gifted from my aunt and uncle and fit perfectly with the room.
The last wall we did was the activity wall, where we used old pallets to create the bookshelves, a growth ruler that a friend made us as a shower gift, and the chalkboard was bought from Amazon. We wanted this wall to be fun and functional for our family.
Our idea was to create a room that Oaklyn could grow into as she got older and that had a lot of say in our decisions for the décor and what furniture we wanted to keep in the room. The room was not just created from my creative ideas, but the combination of my husband’s logical brain (keeping my very extra ideas down to what was realistic), and the sentimental, both handmade and bought, gifts from our friends and families. Let your ideas come together freely, mix patterns and colors, and be open to reusing what you already have in your house!
