One Room Challenge Week 1: Nursery Plans

Welcome to the first week of the Spring 2019 One Room Challenge! If you aren’t familiar with the One Room Challenge, it’s a twice-yearly six week event where participants support each other in finishing one room. Anyone can join as a Guest Participant, so I’m excited to give it a whirl for the first time this round.

If you’ve just arrived at DIY in PDX via the ORC blog, welcome! I’m Rachel, and I blog about everything DIY, from fixing up my old house, to making accessories and decor, to growing plants and cooking. But I’m currently working on my most ambitious DIY project yet: By the end of the Spring 2019 ORC I’ll have given birth to my first child. So I’ll be creating a nursery for our new little one.

The room I’m turning into a nursery is a bedroom that my husband Steven and I used as an office for the last few years. Since my due date is April 10, I’ve actually been slowly working on this room for the past several months, because it needed to be done before the baby arrives, and who knows when that will be!

It’s April 3, and I’m still pregnant, but I could give birth tomorrow, or a week or two from now. The thing about due dates is that they’re just an estimate, so I had to get this room done weeks before the challenge even started. Even though I’ve had the room finished for a while, I documented the makeover to reveal over the course of the challenge, and I haven’t (and won’t) share any photos of the whole completed room until the end of the challenge.

Here’s a bit of the room before its makeover. Unfortunately I didn’t take photos of the whole room (why?? I could have sworn I did, but for some reason I didn’t), but I do have a few pictures of parts of the room.

This is the big reclaimed wood bookshelf that Steven and I made to hold all of our books and DVDs. It ran along the whole back wall of the space. Don’t worry, we didn’t get rid of it. It’s in our basement now.

There were two desks in the room, one of which you can see the leg of on the right in the photo above. The other desk, which was mine, was across the room on the opposite wall from this one.

Here’s the corner of the other side of the room. The door is on the wall opposite the bookshelf, and it’s to a closet. That lovely pile of cords and electronics is the source of our internet. Because our house is 100+ years old, we have hacks like this one, where we plugged an Ethernet cable into our router, and then threaded it out the window and back in through a window in our basement so that we can have corded internet down there. (Wireless isn’t fast/reliable enough.) Obviously this is a situation we’ll have to find a child-friendly solution to.

Here’s the layout of the room. The door on the left is the entrance, and the one on the right is the closet. It’s not a big room, but there will be plenty of space for a nursery, and eventually a bedroom.

The Nursery Plan

Although we knew quite early on that we are having a girl (unless they tell us differently when they’re old enough to have thoughts about that), we definitely didn’t want a feminine room. The walls were already light blue in here, but my first instincts were to paint them white or mint green.

Steven had some opinions, though. He thought white was boring, and that the light blue already looks almost mint green in some lights, so why bother painting? Normally I would have been perfectly happy to just paint the room by myself, but he would have been doing this paint job, and while he would have done it if I really wanted him to, before I picked out new paint I changed my mind.

What prompted the change was finding this rug. I spotted it in the store, then ordered it during a 30% off sale as kind of an impulse buy. When it got here I realized that the blue in the pattern matched the blue on the walls quite well, so I decided that my version of gender-neutral would be blue AND pink. Blue has been one of my favorite colors for most of my life, and Steven likes pink, so I’m happy to put our own spin on those old-fashioned gendered color rules.

What I have in mind for this room is blue, pink, white, and natural wood tones. I love animals of all types, so those will definitely make an appearance, along with lots of plants, and some DIY accents, of course. I’ve been pinning inspiring ideas on my nursery board. Here’s my moodboard for the space:

I can’t wait to take you through the whole transformation of this room, and to see the work of the other ORC guest participants and featured designers!