Rockabye
A Nursery Built for Our Greatest Adventure
We created a beautiful and magical room for our most anticipated addition.
When you think about your life and imagine your future, maybe that includes marriage and kids, you don’t really factor in infertility. For us, it took 13 years longer than we expected to get pregnant because of infertility. We were determined to grow our family, even if we only had one child. We looked into adoption, surrogacy and IVF. I wanted to have a baby and as an adopted child, my husband wanted to have one of his own. Four years in the making we welcomed our son, Theo in September. I can go on and on about our experience, but that’s a blog post for another time. So as we curate our house turned home, we were very excited to turn a room into a beautiful nursery.
When we found out that we were having a little boy, we thought a lot about his name, what kind of parents we wanted to be and the environment in which he’d be raised. There’s so much pressure to do things just right — read to him every night, teach him a second language, Montessori lessons at home, ethics, how to discipline, etc. I read so many pregnancy and parenting books and was overwhelmed with it all. I had to reel myself in and focus on one thing at a time. For now, that would be the nursery. I wanted to create a safe and happy place for him to play, create, rest and dream up all of his adventures, real and imagined.
The old guest room was a real blank canvas. When we moved into the house in 2019 we had all of the room painted from the crazy colors we found to a calm warm beige. The room didn’t need much except for a closet remodel.
To get the needed organization in the nursery closet, we ripped out the outdated shelving and hanging rod in lieu of updated shelving and drawers. We utilized the Ikea PAX shelving system which was easy to use. Measure your space and use the online Ikea planning tool to design your ideal closet. We used the Ikea Aurdal system in our master closet and it was just as easy. The nursery closet wasn’t an exact match to maximize the PAX closet sizes, so we used one 29 1/2 x 92 7/8 sized PAX frame with three shelves and four drawers. Due to supply chain issues, it took some time to get new material. The best way to work around that is to check out the As-Is section at Ikea. We found all of the shelves needed for half price and in decent condition! We reused the existing hanging rods and cut them to size, mounting them on each side with 1 x 2 wood cuts and toggle anchors to support the weight.
Reading was always an important part of my childhood. I loved every adventure I would discover every time I opened up a new book. I loved the smell of pages — the older the book the better. I have many memories of my parents and grandparents reading to me and my sisters. So when building the nursery, it had to have a “library”. Four spice racks from Ikea repurposed worked perfectly for easy access to board books. We topped it off with a hand painted Harry Potter Ravenclaw shield by Italian artist, Odile. Additionally, we added a bookshelf with classic collections and styled to the theme. Let’s just hope Theo loves to read!
I furnish my home, and by extension my life, with purpose by supporting artists and creators who invest themselves in their products. I found beautiful print art, lighting and decal work from artists online. The furniture was sourced through online retailers in order to curate a bespoke style at an accessible price. You can find a full list of products used for this project below.
Ikea Sundvik Changing Table
Ikea Bekvam Spice Rack