Transforming a home office into a nursery – ‘behind the scenes’

The nursery is nearly ready and this baby is nearly ready to make an appearance, too – just six more weeks to go! The day the cot and pram arrived last week it all suddenly felt very real as we could start imagining a baby actually being in the house. I think it feels a bit too real for Otto as the first thing he does every morning is go into the nursery and sit and stare at the toys in the cot and then lies down and guards them all day; it’s going to be an interesting transition for him.

Anyhoo, I thought you might like to see some of the progress snaps as we transformed our home office to what will be the baby’s room. This has definitely been a tricky room to decorate and furnish as I have no idea how we will use this room. It all feels very much like unchartered territory so the room isn’t particularly striking in design as I focused more on changing its function, decluttering, making space and creating a blank canvas that we can fill as and when we get to know baby and our needs as parents – I hope that makes sense! By the way, my friend and I have a few more things for sale over on my Instagram sale page, if you are interested.

So, here are the different phases of the room’s transformation…

Making space and decluttering

I knew the vast majority of work that would go into this room was changing its function. If you take a look at our home office it was full of tools, craft supplies, stationery, computers, printers, office chairs, a huge desk etc. Most of it had to go and to achieve that I had to make some space that would enable me to sort, organise and declutter. Therefore, the first job we did was break the desk in half (we used the MDF from the half we got rid of to make a very handy platform in our hallway cupboard for extra storage for the pram bits) and then push the remaining half up to the wall so I had lots of floor space to play with. I gave myself two weeks – a couple of weekend afternoons and evenings here and there – to get the job of clearing the room out done, which included selling a lot of stuff on Instagram and eBay. It was quite a smooth process and although we were surrounded by parcels to be sent off and piles of stuff for charity/recycling/to keep it was manageable because of the extra space in the room created by the moving the desks around.

Removing wall hangings, filling in holes and freshening wall paint

Once I knew what we were keeping I stuffed it on to the String Shelves and created a pile of stuff in one corner of our living room. We had to keep the one remaining desk as we had to work during the day, doing DIY only at weekends, but this was easy to work around. The first DIY job was filling in holes in the walls where we had removed the pegboard, peg rails, shelves etc. and then sanding these down ready for a lick of paint just to freshen the walls.

Painting the floor

We were able to get away with touching up the wall paint but the floor has seen a huge amount of wear and tear over the last three years since it was last painted. This room has been such a hard working room as there have been two of us working in here pretty much every day and desk chair wheels and constant crafting/DIY projects and moving stuff around has taken its toll. Therefore, we had to give the floor a couple of coats of new paint and we used Farrow & Ball’s All White floor paint again, which goes on so easily so it’s not a particularly difficult job. It was at this point that we finally got rid of the desk, sold our desk chairs and moved out of the room.

Painting the woodwork

The woodwork was horribly scuffed and dirty as it hasn’t been painted for over six years and it looked really bad in contrast to a freshly painted floor and walls. Therefore, I decided early on that this was where I wanted to add a bit of colour so we painted the skirting boards, window frame and ledge and the door and its frame. I chose Farrow & Ball’s Light Blue, which gives a hint of colour and definition and a nice basis for the room’s overall colour scheme.

Adding new furniture

Once all the painting was done we could arrange for delivery of the new furniture and lay a lovely wool rug (20% off today!) that instantly made the room feel cosy and welcoming. The only remaining task is to now sort out where to store and display the ‘stuff’ we want to keep in this room and I will do that over the next couple of weeks.

As you can see, not a particularly thrilling or exciting transformation and the work mainly went into clearing the room and changing its function but it does feel totally different now. I will show you in a couple of weeks what the finished room looks like now we have the new furniture in and a few baby things kicking around.

Katy x

*When I say ‘we’ did this, ‘we’ did that, I basically mean Jules did it all. I did all the prep and painting in our living room and kitchen at the beginning of the year but this time round I had the perfect excuse to sit back and bark orders 😉