The first and most important room to be completed in our house renovation, is of course the nursery! Have a look at the before and afters of our nursery renovation and shop anything you might fancy!
Let’s start with some good old ‘before and after’ photos of the different views of the room. When you are in the flow of renovating a house, the to do list seems endless and its sometimes easy to forget about the progress that you have made. I really enjoyed looking back at these and remembering all the work and changes (big and small) that we have put into the room. It’s always hard to remember to take before photos when you are in the motion, so these before photos are the best I have…just roll with it.
Starting with our bookshelf… at only 8 months old, our daughter has an excellent book collection. This is due to us asking for our family and friends favourite childhood books for her christening gift. Each one had a personal message inside and we only got two duplicates on the day! I think it’s so lovely and sentimental for her as she grows up, (we also got some first editions!). Some of her favourites (at her current age of 8 months) shown below. Others she will enjoy as she gets older, but the shorter, simpler, and more colourful the better at the moment. I also knew I had a bookshelf to fill, so what better way to get going.
The shelving is my favourite feature of the nursery and one I really enjoyed accessorising and putting together. I have tried to make it a good mix of toys, books and aesthetically pleasing accessories such as the photo frame. I am usually a lover of a neutral room with just a few accessories to incorporate colour, but my husband ban me from making the nursery ‘boring’, and I’m really glad he did. Shop the rest of the bookshelf below and if I have missed anything drop a comment in the box and I will get back to you!
For the wardrobe in the nursery, we were quoted to have a fitted wardrobe at just under £2000.00 at the same time we got them fitted into our bedroom, but decided against them in this room with it being a childs room. It is a room we want our daughter to stay in and grow into, and we thought there wasn’t any need for an expensive wardrobe that ‘may’ get drawn on at some point. So we opted for an Ikea wardrobe that fit perfectly in the space, and I changed the handles to some ‘Plank’ handles to give it a less ‘Ikea’ look.
Shop This ‘After’ Image
Wardrobe – Ikea
Wardrobe Handles – Plank
Crates – KIDLY
Abacus – Ikea
Column Radiator – B&Q
Radiator Valves – Victorian Plumbing
Wire Name Sign – The Little Squid
Wardrobe Dividers By Age- Amazon
- If changing your Ikea handles for others, ring Ikea customer service (if it dosen’t already say online) to check the distance between the holes for the handles pre drilled on the doors, this way you can be sure your alternatives will fit!
- When looking at column radiators, there are 2, 3 and 4 column options, make sure to get the amount of columns suited to the temperature of your room, for example our nursery has the boiler in it, so we should not have bought a 3 column radiator (you live and you learn). The new column radiators are also great at holding heat even after the heating is switched off!
- The wire name sign also make great gifts! Ours was in fact a baby shower gift, I am not into too much ‘personalisation’ but I thought this was gorgeous, and it is not restricted to names, the lady @the_littlesquid can create anything and everything from wire!
- As our daughter was our first baby, we got a slightly (really only slightly) more expensive cot, as it turned into a bed for when she has outgrown the cot, with the hope she will keep it until she is 4 years old (so the description says but we will see, we have a very tall girl on our hands).
- The blinds for the nursery have the added blackout option, this is not even a recommendation but a necessity for a baby room and something you may not think of if it is your first baby! We managed with a stick up black out blind before we completed the nursery but it is not ideal to take down every day (a pain in the a**e in fact.)
- We put our panelling quite high (approx 1.5 metres) as the wallpaper I had chosen was very busy, and too much for a full or even half wall coverage (in my opinion), something to consider when going about your panelling height /wallpaper choices.
- Finally, the Homesense store is always worth a browse, their stock varys so much that you never know what you will find but items that I find to be consistently good are their storage baskets, bedside tables/side tables and most of the time, chairs! If you are really invested like me, you could find out what day their delivery comes in and go in for a browse of any new stock before the good stuff goes.
Shop this ‘After’ Image
Cot – John Lewis
Blinds – Blinds2Go
Wall Light – Made.com
Wallpaper – World of Wallpaper
Strawberry Basket – H&M
Both Boucle Chairs – Homesense (LaRedoute and Zara Home have similar, just a little more pricey)
After
