Boyo’s Nursery

This is actually a very ancient post – but if I’ve done one on this topic I haven’t actually posted it, and it’s not categorized properly, so let’s actually put it in here under Bungalow Projects because it is a bungalow project.

When we moved into our Bungalow there were two seriously problematic rooms and a couple of semi-problematic ones. The first two were the kitchen and the back bedroom both of which had very dated sixties/seventies style décor. The back bedroom was the room we decided to turn into Boyo’s room, which had the nice side-effect of requiring us to jump in and actually make it not look like this.

I knew that I wanted to use the Dwell Studio’s owl designs for sheets and changing table covers, so we looked at the colors in that design for our paint colors. These colors were not chosen in the strictest adherence to Craftsman time period but paint is reasonably easy to change out – so at what point in time Boyo wants new colors, or we should no longer wish to use it as a nursery, it should be reasonably simple to change the paint to something more reflective of the period.

My parents were a huge help with this project and it could not have been completed with out them, especially considering I was quite pregnant at the time. Stripping off the wall-paper provided us with all sorts of interesting gems.

Everything was painted, the ceiling a lighter blue from the walls – all of the hardware in the room stripped and looked amazing when that was done and the end result is much improved – yes?

These two snapshots are both from a year ago, and the room has changed a bit since then, but you can see the ideas at play. I took a lot of inspiration from Montessori style children’s rooms, particularly Finn’s room from Sew Liberated. I wanted the room to be Boyo friendly with everything he would need to be available at his height. His bed is a Montessori style floor bed, his toys can be found on his shelf. It’s pretty simple and sparse and I try to keep it that way but change things out semi-frequently now that he has more toys to choose from. I feel like simplicity is good for him, and it’s definitely good for my sanity to limit the number of toys that can be dumped out all over the place. We purchased the Tree with Two Owls and Butterflies Decal from Etsy and it was a lovely addition. I’ve also added brown black-out curtains for the windows.

A few things changed in the past year, namely the baby gym is gone. He currently has a cardboard play house that his Papa made for him out of a box. I keep a simple mission style rocker in there for bedtime and story reading, but otherwise the room has stayed fairly simple and fairly similar to these photos, and it’s perfect for us.

When we redid it the simplicity and the fresh paint meant it was one of my favourite rooms in the house, and it’s still one of my favourite rooms in the house, although I do have to keep on the simplicity aspect to make certain it stays that way. 🙂