Nursery Hell (2)
Posted 22 January, 2008 in DIY
For a visual retard like me, the idea of decorating a room is simultaneously exciting and horrifying. I’ve stood in our soon-to-be-nursery so many times, looking around at what space we’ve got and what furniture we already have to fill it, and instead of being inspired, I’m overwhelmed. I love looking at Web sites like ohdeedoh.com to get ideas, but soon my head begins to spin - what colors should we choose? What if the red lockers we already have clash with everything and we have to move them out, and then we’re left with no toy/book storage, and we can’t find another piece that fits our needs? And should I go back to IKEA, or will I eventually hate myself for buying such generic furniture and wish I’d scoured Craigslist instead? And where will I find curtains, and should I just make them myself in order to get exactly what I want, or am I setting myself far too many tasks, especially considering that in a month or two, I will be so enormous that I might not even be able to fit behind my sewing machine anymore? And can I achieve that perfect balance of practicality and beauty, or will the room end up looking dull because, in all my organizing and furniture-getting, I actually forgot to really decorate it? And then I fall on the floor frothing at the mouth, and O has to come and sit with me to make sure I don’t swallow my tongue.
Here are the pieces of furniture we currently intend to move into the nursery.
Two tall red steel IKEA lockers which will sit next to one another.
One wood and stainless-steel IKEA dresser, which will have a changing pad on top of it.
One Pali crib in white, courtesy of O’s friend Dave, whose kids have outgrown it. This isn’t the exact crib - they don’t make the exact model anymore, but this is pretty close to what it looks like.
So far, the colors we have in the room are red and white. We could go with some red curtains and a red bookshelf, but maybe the room will turn out too fire-enginy if we go that way. Also, if I have a predominantly red color scheme, will my little boy turn out to be an angry, hyperactive psychopath? Shouldn’t I have more soothing greens or blues to chill him out a bit? I’ve never really seen a nursery decorated in red before.
We could also move in this dresser, which is currently sitting in the other room:
This is an Oeuf dresser, and is infinitely cooler and more expensive than the dresser we own, but they share the same square shape and minimalist design. Ignore the legs - our dresser ain’t got no legs. If we use the white dresser and the white crib, but move the lockers out, we can then throw in whatever color scheme we choose. We can’t really paint the walls (which are currently white) because I think our landlord’s head would explode if we even broached the subject, but we can have big splashes of color in the bookshelf, on the crib bedding, in the art, and on the curtains. We could even solve the boring-white-furniture problem by making our crib multicolored. I have a secret, shameful lust for multicolored things: if I see an object I like and it comes in several colors, I immediately fantasize about owning one in each hue. Once when I was a drunken teenager coming home from an afternoon of Jello shots with a friend, I stopped off at WH Smith and bought myself an enormous pack of colored pens, for no other reason than that they were pretty. Maybe this is my chance, finally, to indulge my weird rainbow fetish - at least until my son is old enough to ask why Mommy decorated his room like a float at Gay Pride week. (Or maybe he’ll be gay, in which case my decor choice will fit him perfectly.)
Blue, green and brown is also a nice color scheme - it’s not too kiddie-twee-looking (oh, and like rainbow colors are soooo mature, Kate! I contradict myself constantly.) This nursery is awesome - they managed to make it colorful even though they, like us, were forbidden to paint the walls. I love the Flor tiles they use as a rug. The idea of putting an ultrasound photo on the wall is great, too, as is the grouping of tiny pictures and the little dude sitting on the shelf. A white couch, though? If I were a baby (and I once was, believe it or not), I’d see that couch as a pristine, rectangular target at which to aim my frequently exploding butt.
My next dilemma: now that I have some decorating ideas, how do I catalogue and store them? I could go the way of the printed-out/ripped-from-magazine page and stick them all in a binder, but I am loath to add yet another binder full of junk to my already cluttered bookshelf. An online gallery might be a good idea - perhaps I’ll set one up on Flickr. But then where do I store printed pages? I’d like to keep everything in one place, rather than having one online place and one real-life site. And then there’s the dilemma of color - if I’m at work, I can’t be printing out reams of stuff on the color printer, so any printed pages will have to be in black and white, which will be useless if I like the color of something -
And once again, the foaming at the mouth begins…