The Nursery | One Room Challenge Week One

April 5, 2018 Stevie Storck

I've decided to link up with the One Room Challenge to share the process of designing a nursery for our first baby! We started clearing out our former guest bedroom back in February when I was about 6 months pregnant. Now that we have just 8 weeks left before our little girl's expected arrival, Anthony and I thought this 6 week challenge would be good motivation to get the room done on time! So if you're a longtime SSDC reader, this post will feel like a bit of a recap. But if you've just found me through the ORC website -- welcome!

I'm Stevie, an interior designer, thrift store regular, kind of outdoorsy wife and soon-to-be mama! My husband, Anthony and I are slowly renovating our 1903 fixer upper in York County, Pennsylvania. You can see more of our house right here.

So yes, since we already started the room we won't technically be sharing in real time this first week or two. But there is still plenty of work to be done and surprise or two in the design that I haven't shared yet! Let's get started with what the room looked like in it's previous life as a guest bedroom/hodge-podge of all our extra furniture. Just a warning, these before photos aren't the prettiest. I had stripped the bed to do laundry and ended up taking these at 9pm one evening, right before I convinced Anthony to take apart the bed and move it to another room with me.

Now for the inspiration. Since this is our smallest bedroom and we hope to have more children in the future, we want to make this room pretty gender neutral so it can stay the nursery as our older kids would "graduate" to a larger room in the house. Our overall plans for the space are similar to our goals for the rest of our fixer upper --to add more character and historic charm back into the room. Our house is a 1903 colonial/farmhouse but the upstairs especially is sadly lacking with original details. So adding some type of architectural interest and antique-inspired details are high on my priority list for the nursery! I'm personally not a big fan of themed or overly "baby-ish" nursery designs. They are super cute, but I want the nursery to grow with our family and feel like it fits in with the style of the rest of our house. Here are some examples of elegant, collected nurseries that are inspiring me right now:

La Sueur Interiors | Claire Boeshaar | Chris Loves Julia

Our goal was to design a nursery for our baby girl that feels classic, traditional and a little country contrasted with some simple, modern accents to keep things fresh. There are some things that were already in the guest room that will be staying in the new nursery design, like the mint velvet settee. Anthony is the one who spotted it at a yard sale two years ago, and it's still one of his favorite items in our house. It is surprisingly comfortable for it's petite scale (and us being two pretty tall people) and when we bought it, I immediately imagined it in a nursery someday. The IKEA dresser is from our last apartment and we plan to top it with a changing pad to eliminate the need for a separate changing table.

I'll be sharing more about the design and a peek at the new paint color next week, but if you just can't wait for more, click here to read my previous progress post with a few extra photos and more about the design decisions we've already made for the space.

And don’t forget to check out the 20 featured bloggers below or right here and the rest of the guest participants here. Thanks for following along!

See this gallery in the original post