Design a Baby Girl’s Nursery

Designing a little girl’s nursery is a fun project featuring a classic, comfortable and chic little adventurer theme! Read all about my goal for the room, inspiration, theme and final design board.

Wall Color | Rug | Crib | Dresser | Chair | Pouf Ottoman | Pillow | Animal Prints | Hippo Book End |Trunk Wall Hook| Baskets | Little Adventurer Print | Mirror

Today’s post is something a little different than my usual recipe or travel posts. In the past few months I began a fun new project to design a little girl’s nursery. As soon as we learned that we were expecting a baby girl this summer, we made a list of all of the things we still wanted to do in our house and started checking them off. We live in a 1950’s craftsman home. While much of the home was already remodeled before we moved it, a bedroom and an office still had old wood paneling and outdated fixtures, plumbing and electrical. If we were going to tackle the remaining projects, now was the time to do it. Of course, we added a few more smaller projects along the way. As a result, half of my house has been under renovation since the beginning of the year.  We added a huge walk in closet to a spare bedroom that we currently use as an office, replaced all of the old electrical and plumbing, and completely gutted, renovated and remodeled two rooms.

One of the rooms will be my little girl’s nursery. The room before was old and outdated. It was so ugly that I can’t even find a before picture. After some new drywall went up, molding was installed and painting was complete, I had a fresh blank slate to start planning my little girl’s room. The color of the walls is White Dogwood by Sherwin Williams and it is a soft subtle pink with coral undertones. It’s really beautiful and I love it more in person than I thought I would.

We also gutted the closet. While it isn’t a walk in closet, I knew that I wanted to make the most efficient use of the space as possible. The picture below was taken before we added the doors. I’ll share more details about the closet in a future post but I purchased the closet organizer from Wayfair and also purchased an additional set of shelves and rods. The quality is much better than anything I found at the standard home improvement stores.

Design a Baby Girl’s Nursery

Initially, I considered hiring a designer either locally or remote that could help me plan the room and turn my vision into reality. There are a lot of great affordable designers that will work with you to create a vision board, recommend products to purchase and even help you set up the room. But, with a few months to go before renovations were complete, I decided to tackle the project entirely myself. I needed another fun project, besides recipe development and photography, to keep me busy while half my house was in disarray.

Goal for the room: Create a relaxing, classic, chic room that she could grow into. I didn’t want anything too babyish.

Inspiration: Animal Print Shop Prints and Elodie Rug by Lulu and Georgia

I really love the little darlings animal prints and elodie rug. These two items served as the initial inspiration for the room. The entire color palette came from the rug and I based my theme around the safari animals. I recommend choosing just a few pieces as inspiration for the room and work from those pieces.

Theme: Little Adventurer

Even before I knew I was having a little girl, I knew that I wanted to incorporate my love for animals and travel. Hopefully my little girl will have a desire to seek out new adventures and explore the world.

Creating an Inspiration Board

Creating an inspiration board like the one above is key to designing a room. For novice designers like myself, the board helped me arrange all of the pieces I loved in one place. Starting with the rug as inspiration, I chose the three main colors for the room. Initially, I started with the pink and mint colors and then added the navy as an accent. The design board helps to visualize what everything will look like together. I created the design board on Olioboard which is intuitive and really easy to use. I just uploaded photos of the products I liked to the “my items” tab on my board and dragged them into place.

I created this design over a period of many weeks. I found pieces I liked online and added them to the board slowly. After a few days, I would come back to the design and revisit additional pieces. Below, you can see that “my items” folder includes many other pieces that I wanted to incorporate into the room.

Finding unique items to incorporate into the design was even more fun than I imagined. I searched Pinterest and popular hashtags on Instagram to find pieces that I loved (#projectnursery, #nurserydesign and #nursery are three that I found useful). Browsing hashtags, other blog posts and online retail shops helped me discover the best resources to purchases products for the nursery and even for general baby gear and accessories. I discovered some of the most unique high quality Etsy shops this way too.

Once the design was complete, I purchased all of the products and then installed everything in the room. The best part was seeing my design come together. Check back next week for a sneak peek of the completed room!

This post may contain affiliate links.