We are so excited to finally share pictures of our baby girl’s nursery! As my last post explained, she was born about a month early and we were SO not prepared for that to happen. Both Ronan and I tend to be overly optimistic about most things, which sounds sweet, but can lead to real trouble when situations like this arise. Although we didn’t have a finished nursery to come home to, what we did have was a general plan and a couple of Pinterest photos for inspiration.

We knew that we wanted to use this opportunity to flex our creative design muscles a little bit. We love, love, love neutrals and try not to lean too much into trends, but this nursery just seemed like a good place to break our own rules. We knew that it was a room that would probably change and evolve faster than the other rooms in our house, since the baby living in it would also be changing and growing quickly (too quickly!!). We also already had a lot of white nursery furniture from when our son was a baby and since we are cheap frugal green, we were sure we wanted to reuse that furniture. Instead of using our usual white paint and putting the white furniture in front of it, we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try out a dark wall color.

Enter the color that had a serious interior-design-moment in 2019– green! (I know, I know…you saw it coming.) When I think of babies, I think of soft, gentle colors. In theory, the thought of popping a newborn into a dark room sounds like a punishment that I would never agree to, but the photos that I found of beautiful green nurseries spoke to me in a way that I couldn’t explain! If you have ever read our “Things that we like” section of our About Us page, it clearly states that we are scared of any color that isn’t a variation of white, yet we were 100% sure we were going to go in a very different direction with our new baby’s room and we are so glad that we took the risk.

The General Plan

Here are a few pictures that we found on Pinterest that really sold us on the green nursery idea.

The Starting Point

If you were following along with our blog before our little one-year-hiatus, you saw pictures of the room that we referred to lovingly as “the creepy room.” It was quite possibly the roughest room in the house. We got messages after we first posted pictures of the room from adults letting us know they were going to have nightmares about themselves in that room. It was originally a catch-all room and then a room that our son kept his toys in and lovingly referred to as his “clubhouse”. Then, it eventually became his bedroom. I use the term “bedroom” loosely because I am ashamed to say that we made our small child sleep in there. In all fairness, he almost never stayed in his own bed all night anyway, so does it really count as a bedroom just because his bed, clothes, toys, and everything he owned were in it? I am going to go on the record as saying it does not. He liked it though, graffitied walls, cracked windows, and all. I like to think that he was a 3-year-old with a vision. Maybe he was drawn to it because he knew that the room would someday be the perfect place for his future sibling to rest and play. (Or maybe I give him too much credit and he was just too busy thinking about ice cream and Daniel Tiger to care about the state of his bedroom walls.)

Anyway, here is a reminder of what the room looked like before we started working on it. Brace yourselves…

Progress?

As is usually the case in our renovations, things got a lot uglier, dirtier, and darker before they got better…..

But over time we began to see the (literal) light…

Enough already! Show us the room!

Alright, I am getting impatient with this post, so I can only imagine how those of you reading it feel. There were honestly months of work that happened between the pictures above and the finished product. We (mostly Ronan) worked on the room after the kids were asleep in the evenings and on weekend days here and there. We never want to let this renovation get in the way of time with our family, which is part of the reason these things take us SO long to finish.

When it was all said and done, our baby girl wasn’t even a newborn anymore, but we would not have changed a thing about this whole process. Creating these rooms together has turned into more than just a hobby for Ronan and I. These rooms mean that we always have something to work on together and something exciting to talk about.

Late in my pregnancy, people often asked me how the nursery was going and they asked with an urgency that I couldn’t even relate to. I would usually tell them “We still have over a month left, so we will be ok!” and they would always say “How are you not freaking out about this?”

The answer then wasn’t that clear to me, but a year later I know why I wasn’t freaking out. Just as Ronan and I figured out how to help our teensy-tiny 5-pound baby begin to grow and thrive, we figured out how to make time to finish the nursery and we figured out just how we wanted it to look. If you have the right team, tiny babies and unfinished nurseries and all those minor bumps in the road don’t have to be scary, they can be exciting…they are new adventures.

Our little girl turned a year old last month, but her life- her great big adventure- is really just starting. We know this room will be hers for such a short amount of time when you look at the big picture, but we feel so lucky to have such a peaceful and happy place for her to call her own. We love the room so, so much and we did our best to take some photos that do its beauty justice. We hope you can see what we see in it and that you like it too!

Now that this room is done, we have jumped headfirst into new messes headaches adventures and we can’t wait to share more with all of you soon. Thank you so much for following along and for the kind words last week. We are so excited to be connecting with you again through this blog : )