When I was starting to plan our nursery, I had an idea of what I wanted the nursery to look like. Then we found out the wonderful news that we were having twins, and I started to worry that we wouldn’t be able to have everything we wanted in our nursery. That’s when my planning came out. I created a mood board and a layout to try to plan my visions:
Mood Board
For our nursery, we’re going nautical!
I am so absolutely 100% excited about this theme. It is cutesy, but we are able to tie in the vintage, old-world looks that we love. We don’t want the room to scream “BEACH!” nor do we want it to be just a boring room. It is hard to picture the idea of a “vintage nautical nursery with whimsical touches” that is appropriate for a boy and a girl twin, especially when I mention that it will have gray walls, with navy blue, pink, and aqua accents.
So what’s a girl to do?
MOOD BOARD!
This is my first, by the way. So, what do you think? Can you get a better idea of the look we want?
*If you want to make a mood board yourself, you only need to use your favorite digital writing program, like Word or Pages. I prefer Pages (I’m an Apple girl all the way), because I love how I am able to manipulate the text and pictures. Add in some text boxes and pictures. If you want to add some more color, you can add some rectangles with different borders. Just play a bit and use the pictures you like. You really can’t go wrong!*
Layout
Before I found out I was pregnant, we had reserved our old office as the nursery. There was a lot of back-and-forth between Tim and me, deciding whether we wanted to use the big, old office space as a nursery or one of the two smaller rooms. Tim thought that we really could use our small space (my craft room) as a nursery, but I thought that it would be better to have more space to use the nursery also as a playroom.
Well, then we found out it was twins, and there was no question: the large, old office was now the nursery.
Here is the architectural layout (made via Icovia Room Planner):
There are 4 windows: 3 smaller windows along the far wall and a larger window in an alcove on the side. There is also a door to the walk-up attic along the right wall. The closet isn’t as large as it appears on the layout, but that was all I could do with the room planner software via Pottery Barn.
So, after lots of thinking and planning and remeasuring and experimenting with tape, we figured out how we wanted the room to be situated.
We will have the two cribs on the far wall between the windows. The changing table will be on the same wall as the door, as will the glider/ottoman. We will put a narrow bookshelf opposite the attic door. If we can fit it, we will put a window seat/bench in the large window alcove. Hopefully everything will fit!
And now, some actual pictures of the room with tape on the floors:
Oops! That is NOT how we want the room to look (although I’m pretty sure this is very accurate when we have 2 toddlers wandering around). That was the look of the room pre-cleaning and post-electrical work.
This is much better. This is the view from the door to the cribs:
Looking at the cribs from the other corner (where the glider will be):
From the attic walk-up:
From the window alcove, looking at the cribs (left) and the changing table wall (right):
We now have a room full of furniture, painted walls, and decoration. Stay tuned to more Make it Mondays for more DIY updates from our nautical nursery!
*Part of the mood board and layout posts originally appeared on Dory’s blog “Doyle Dispatch.” To read more posts about Dory’s pregnancy and nursery decorating on her blog, you can see the list here.*
In wish we had done the tape-on-the-floor thing. Our cribs, dressers, and reclining loveseat just. barely. fit. I mean, the door literally misses the crib by a millimeter!
I am so glad we taped it out myself, as I was able to more accurately gauge what else I wanted to fit in the room. I scaled back my ideas a lot more, once we had that tape on the floor!