Decorating your baby’s nursery so beautifully it will become a Pinterest favorite is easier than you think. Plus, you don’t need a big budget or years of professional design experience. Here are three insanely easy DIY hacks for decorating your nursery like a pro:
1. Choose a Forgiving Style
Be shrewd when choosing a decor style. From the outset, avoid those difficult and expensive styles like Art Deco that have strict aesthetic rules and require you to purchase highly-specialized furniture, carpets, and fittings that if not paired correctly can look disorganized and amateur. Instead, pick a style that not only embraces a degree of roughness and mismatch, but demands it. Think Bohemian Chic or Modern Rustic. The final result will look just as professional, but is far easier to pull it off, giving you not only more wiggle room on what styles work well together, but can also save you tons of money by hunting for cheaper, second-hand pieces on eBay or local garage sales.
Okay, so now you’ve taken the first and most important step in easily creating a professional-looking nursery. What’s next?
2. Be Creative and “Steal” Your Color Scheme
Your nursery’s color scheme is the next most important choice you are going to make. Get it wrong and there is no amount of crafty ideas or lovely furniture that will save it. Get it right and the room will be mesmerizingly gorgeous before you’ve even got the crib up! How can you nail this super-important color scheme without any design experience? Pablo Picasso has the answer, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
If Pablo says it’s okay to pinch inspiration, then what are you waiting for? My favorite hack for “stealing” a beautiful color scheme is easy to follow:
- Find an image you love and download it. It could be a photo of a breathtaking nursery you’ve seen on Pinterest or your all-time favorite piece of art. Get creative with your choice.
- Upload your image to a Palette Generator like Canva, Coolors, Paletten, or Colormind. I love these tool! They’re super easy to use and instantly give you a wide color palette based on your image.
- Copy the color codes: Under each color you’ll see a “HEX code”, eg, #E5CF49. Write this down.
- Convert colors into real paints: Go to a color converter like EasyRGB or Sherwin-Williams, select data type “HTML,,” and then enter your HEX code. Now choose your paint manufacturer. You’ll see the closest paints to your chosen color which you can now buy. Bingo!
Now you have your super awesome color scheme and your paints ordered, it’s time for a final hack.
3. Plants
Every room in the world looks better with plants. It’s a scientific fact (citation required). Go ahead and pick up a few delightful, baby-friendly plants. Here’s a quick list of some common favorites that are neither toxic, poisonous nor spore-wafting:
- Boston Fern
- Dracaena
- Snake Plant
- Fittonia
- Baby Rubber
- Spider Plant
- Jade Plant
- Prayer Plants
The hack is to grab some terracotta pots and get creative by painting them using the colors from your carefully crafted scheme. You now have perfectly matched, funky flora. You’re on a roll!
You can easily create a gorgeous nursery that looks like it was designed by a pro. It doesn’t require tons of money or experience. The key is to be shrewd about the style you choose; go for one that looks great but is a little rough around the edges. Next, follow Picasso’s advice and steal your inspiration, starting with your color scheme. Finally, to bring it all together, trust mother nature and incorporate greenery. Et voila! A tried and tested formula for creating a uniquely beautiful nursery that is truly Pin-worthy.
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Keane and Neve blog together at WeTheParents.org where she seeks to bring out the humor in parenting and he gets nerdy researching and reviewing the gear that moms and dads (apparently) need. You can also catch them on Facebook and Twitter.
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