Decorating has never been one of my strengths… That may seem strange to some because I’m a graphic designer, but trust me, decorating a room and decorating an interface are two vastly different things. Being addicted to Pinterest, however, and seeing a million clever nursery themes and DIY projects put me in a decorating mood.
As always, I knew I didn’t want to spend much money. I also knew I didn’t want to use a childish theme even though it was for a child. I wanted something inspiring and appealing for me, so trucks and dinosaurs were out. After all, the baby won’t care in the slightest what his nursery looks like. I’m the one who will be hanging out in there, changing diapers and whatnot. After thinking about it for a while I decided to decorate the nursery in maps.
One advantage to this plan was that we already had an enormous world map that my husband and I both love. I also found a cool dresser on Pinterest with maps mod podged to the drawers, and I thought I could pull off something simple like that.
So the first piece we tackled was the dresser. We found one for seven bucks at a salvage yard with my in-laws. It was DIRTY and even though it was made of pressboard, it had been stained instead of painted, so the sucker needed a lot of work. (who stains pressboard?) this is how it looked when we found it:
My husband, his dad, and his brother spray-painted it white and my mother-in-law and I touched it up with some craft paint. Then we somehow fit it into the backseat of our car to take the lovely lady home with us.
It probably sat around our apartment for a good month or two before I finally got around to the mod podge excursion and put on the new hardware, but once we had finished everything I was pretty happy with it. I decided I wanted a little lamp for the nursery as well, so I picked one up at DI for 4 bucks and mod podged maps on the shade so it would match the dresser. Not bad for less than 20 bucks, eh?
I wanted a chair for nursing in so Kyle and I looked in every furniture store we could find, but neither of us could bring ourselves to fork over 400 some odd dollars for a new one. Luckily, after a few days of watching KSL classifieds online I found a reclining, swiveling, rocking chair for $45. It needed to be cleaned and it had some very tiny threadbare patches, but after a thorough going over with baby wipes and permanent marker you’d never know.
Strangely, Our baby never actually used this room. Since he was on oxygen for the first month of his life, we were both tethered to the master bedroom, and we bought a house and moved out before kicking him out of our space. But, as an exercise in decorating, I’d say it was successful!