The nursery is your baby’s first home, and should be somewhere both mum and dad and the baby will enjoy spending time. A space that welcomes your bundle of joy into the world, it should be a safe room where you have all practical things organised like somewhere to change nappies, dispose of nappies, put clothes and all the other things that come with babies.
Whilst functional and comfortable for you, it comes without saying that your baby’s nursery needs to be a safe place. Some considerations there would be making sure there’s adequate ventilation around the cot, that nothing is hanging precariously on the wall over a cot, that there aren’t loads of cushions and toys in a cot which could present a suffocation hazard, etc.
Most mums not only design nurseries for their babies but for themselves too and there’s nothing wrong with that. The babies are too young to care anyway!
With spring on the horizon, wake up your little one’s nursery from its winter hibernation with these easy and oh so cost-effective tips perfect for breathing new life into your baby’s space.
Clear out clutter
Tackling the mess and muddle that’s been lying around since winter should be the first step in any interior update. And, while decluttering may not be your favourite household task, there’s something undeniably therapeutic about the spick and span results of a good spruce up.
Break the task down to make clutter more bearable: divide the space into sections like ‘bookshelf’, ‘play area’ and ‘under the bed’ (who knows what stuff will be found squirreled away under there?!) or work by categories such as clothing and toys. Add subdivisions – ‘train set’, ‘baby grows’ – if needed!
It’s worth being ruthless with clutter: tots grow out of clothes and games at breakneck pace so, while you may want to hang on to that cutesy baby book, is it not now too young for your budding three-year-old bookworm?
All we can say is, there’s a reason why it’s called spring cleaning…
Rearrange to refresh
Moving furniture around is perhaps the easiest (and cheapest!) way to breathe fresh life into your little one’s room. Optimise the space by experimenting with angles, moving furniture from windows and adding one or two strategically positioned mirrors to fool the eye and create an illusion of space.
With convenience the buzzword in any nursery, it’s vital to take time to plan the layout and think about the items you need and the places where you need them. It’s no good storing nappies and nappy wipes at either end of the room!
Buy new bedding
Pristine new sheets are the easiest way to revive bedroom décor. Gender-neutral tones like beige, cream and white are big right now and will help create a lovely, crisp-clean feel just right for spring sunshine.
Neutral colours have the added bonus of being infinitely adaptable; all you need do in a few months is choose some new soft furnishings or accessories in complimentary pastel accents to instantly refresh the space.
Create a feature wall
Also called accent walls, feature walls offer a quick and easy way to revive dreary spaces. Whether you want a high impact focal point with stand-out designs or prefer something more subtle and stylish, feature walls can be adapted to suit any space. And you don’t even need to pick up a paintbrush! Removable wallpaper is perfect for creating instant updates that will make a tired nursery sing. Online retailers like Amazon, Wayfair and Etsy offer hundreds of peel-and-stick papers in a whole range of designs – we love ditzy, geometric prints for fun-loving tots or draw-on (mess-minimising!) chalkboard paper for budding artists.
An even simpler route (don’t we treat you well) to wall renewal is through prints and pictures. Buy low-cost framed prints or get inventive on Google Images to make a gallery wall unique to your little one’s tastes. Keep things informal with different sizes and shapes – the more variety, the better.
