Hellobee

Without a doubt, one of the rooms that I spend a ton of time in these days is our baby girls’ nursery. I had a fun time decorating our girls’ room, but I also was on a limited budget after all of the financial outlays from IVF treatments and surrogacy. For ideas to smartly save money on the nursery and nearly all of our baby gear, I consulted the book Baby Bargains. Here is a peek at our budget-friendly nursery.

(Photo by James Currie)

I am not generally big on themes so I stayed away from any sort of character or object theme when I went about decorating the nursery. I picked out a pinkish/peach color for the wall color and decided to go with white trim and furniture. To save money, we waited for a sale at Wayfair for our cribs, we used our family’s DirectBuy account for the crib mattresses, and we purchased a simple white dresser (which we also use as the changing table) and bookcase at Ikea. By opting for these cheaper alternatives, we had to assemble the furniture ourselves. But we actually loved this! Both Mr. Starfish and I had envisioned building baby furniture together as we “nested” and we held back on building the cribs until each baby girl passed her 20 week ultrasound so when we got that green light, it was a very joyous event to build those cribs.

For wall décor, I picked out a wall calendar that had sweet sayings and phrases and that matched the color scheme. I then deconstructed the calendar and displayed my favorites in white 12×12 frames that I purchased at Jo-Ann’s online for about nine bucks apiece. Using the calendar cut down expenses quite a bit but still lent a sweet and girly feeling to the nursery walls.

Dresser/changing table in use with Baby Audrey. (Photo by James Currie)

I also brought some color into the nursery by spelling out the girls’ names above their cribs in multi-colored wood letters. I really lucked out with the letters because they happened to be 40% off when I visited Michael’s. The worst part of the letters was hanging them up, and I give Mr. Starfish all the credit for that!

(Photo by James Currie)

I was pretty turned off by the expense of a glider or rocker but also thought that it was a critical piece in the nursery. To save money here, we simply used a recliner that we had previously used in our living room. It isn’t a perfect match color-wise, but I figured I could live with it in exchange for the money we saved. It has ended up working out great and the color mismatch really hasn’t bothered me.

Rocking Baby Lilly in our old recliner, re-purposed for use in the nursery. (Photo by James Currie)

A few things in our nursery have worked really well for us. The first is a lamp near our changing station with a red light bulb. I’m not sure where I read the tip, but somewhere in my nesting stage I learned that a red light bulb is a secret of night nannies because apparently the light doesn’t signal the “awake” mind function as much as a regular light bulb. I picked up a lamp and the red light bulb at Target for cheap, and I love the soft glow that is emitted when we are putting the girls down for the night or changing a nighttime diaper.

Our red light bulb lamp is paired with a frame featuring a picture from me and our surrogate’s pregnancies with the girls. I found this sweet frame for only $3 at Marshall’s.

Another necessity for us in the beginning was a small refrigerator in the nursery. We live in a multi-level townhouse and the kitchen is downstairs while the nursery is upstairs. When I was still pumping and we were feeding the girls breastmilk in the middle of the night, it was nice to be able to simply grab the bottle from the nursery fridge rather than hiking all the way downstairs. We spent about $30 on this fridge by scouring eBay. With the girls now exclusively on formula, the fridge is no longer necessary in the nursery, but we have kept it up there for now as it serves as a table for our baby formula maker. It’s also been nice for spillover from our kitchen fridge, especially for the large watermelons that I am so partial to in the summer months!

Refrigerator clearly visible in this family shot, cluttered as usual with bottles and bottle warmer and formula maker.

We were lucky that the closet of the nursery already happened to have pretty perfect shelving solutions for baby clothes and gear. One of my favorite things for the closet has been closet organizers, which I never would have thought to purchase but that a mom friend smartly gifted me. These have been so wonderful in getting the babies’ closet organized and attractive.

With spring/summer babies, I was worried that sunlight and the long summer daytime hours might impede the babies’ sleep and bedtime. So I purchased black-out window coverings for the nursery. These things are serious and when we put them down — the room is pitch-black! I’m honestly not sure that such intense black-out coverings were necessary as the babies seem to sleep despite the presence of light or not, but I could see these being more useful as they get older and as we try to get into a naptime schedule.

On the whole, I’m pretty happy with our nursery and don’t have too many regrets in skimping on some things to save money. Most importantly, the girls seem content and the space is functional. The only thing that I wish I had in the nursery that I don’t is more storage space. But until we leave cramped downtown Chicago living, that is likely to remain on my wish list!