9 Months Later… Baby Bedroom Reveal!

We just had a “nursery corner” in our bedroom when his big sister was born. We installed a ceiling track from IKEA around the crib so we could close it off with blackout curtains.

Baby boy is lucky that he has his own bedroom (his sister slept in a corner of our bedroom until she was almost two years old)! However, his bedroom was not perfectly decorated when he arrived. In fact, it only was transformed from a guest room into a nursery a few hours before he arrived (because the guest room furniture had nowhere to go until the basement was finished… and the basement wasn’t finished until the day before he was born…). But I’ve been working on decorating his room little by little since he was born, and now, 9 1/2 months later, I am finally ready to call it done!

As usual, I didn’t have the room all planned out when I started. But I guess the theme that took shape could be called “vintage transportation”.

His curtains were the first project I tackled. I bought plain navy black-out curtains from Target, a set of star stencils from the craft store, and some cheap white fabric paint. I dabbed tiny amounts of the paint onto a foam brush and stenciled stars onto the curtain randomly. Since the paint wasn’t too thick, it gave the stars a faded look.

Next, I searched the entire universe for a sailboat stencil… and came up empty. So instead, I turned to Google. When I found a sailboat silhouette that I liked on Google Images, I copied it into a word doc and expanded it until the image filled an 8×11 page. After printing it out, I taped it to a manila folder and used a razor blade and cutting board to cut the shape out of the manila folder to make my own stencil. (They do sell make-your-own-stencil sheets, but this was far cheaper and just as easy!). The curtains kind of remind me of Harold and his purple crayon now that they are up! Maybe my inner designer has been subconsciously taken over by children’s book illustrations…

Other pieces of the room sort of just fell together. My sister gave me a handmade rug for Christmas. Somehow she tied pieces of fabric together and it turned out looking like this! It was a perfect fit in the nursery.

For the walls, I took three plain black frames from Dollar Tree, spray-painted them red, and then filled them with a few of my favorite pictures of vintage transportation – which I found for free by searching on Google Images.

My sister-in-law gave me a hand-me-down shelf in the shape of a truck. It had hooks for hanging on the wall, but I thought it would be a cute way to store board books at baby-height – so I put it on the floor instead of on the wall.

For another wall, my brother took a picture of one of my favorite signs that hangs at one of our favorite local coffee shops, and we blew up the picture onto an 11×14 canvas (courtesy of Groupon). I love the vintage look to this sign and that it has my son’s name on it! I would have stolen the sign if I could, but it’s a little too large to sneak out of the building discretely. And I suppose it might not have fit very well in his room either.

And finally, I splurged on one item… a mobile with four vintage airplanes. It is very similar to one that is sold by Pottery Barn, but I found this one for about half the cost on Amazon. It was still a splurge, but after spending a long time racking my brain for a way to make one of my own, my hubby finally told me to just buy it. Sometimes you just can’t replicate the real thing!