Our Nursery Closet Makeover

First I’ll say, we have very limited closet space in our 140-year-old home, which is why we went with a large dresser for the nursery. That being said, I knew I wanted to make the most of the small closet the nursery does have, and I just loved what Monika Hibbs’ did with her daugher’s nursery a few years ago, painting the inside of it pink. I used that as inspiration but of course wanted to make it a bit less pink, and a bit more boy – yes in the stereotyping blue/pink sense of the word. (Fellow feminists, please don’t judge.)

 

The closet really had nothing special going on. A poorly installed wire shelf that was barely hanging on. So first step was choosing the right color for the closet, then step two was ripping out that wire shelf.

The Before

 

So step one was choosing a paint color!

Dan and I went to Home Depot and got a few samples of moody, muted light blues… going off a few of the decorative items I’d already purchased for the space.

Turns out – they were all WAY too dark. I don’t have a ton of experience painting with color but lesson learned: always ask the shop to lighten the color you like by at least 75%.

We ended up going with Behr’s Norwester at 75% lighter. It’s honestly STILL darker than I would’ve liked but oh well! I think it turned out quite nice!

 

Then after exhaustively looking for shelving options and discovering closet shelving – and even just wall shelves – are quite the pretty penny, we ended up hiring our trusty handyman to cut and install super cheap wood and closet piping from Home Depot… this whole project ended up costing around $100 including his fee! The ONE floating shelf I was considering from RHbaby cost around that with tax and shipping and it wasn’t even the right size! So we were happy with the spend.

 

What’s nice is we technically have two rods installed but they can both easily be removed if needed. The thinking was, his clothes would just get bigger and probably hang over the lower rod. Turns out we now won’t be in this house long enough for that to happen but that was the idea!

 

The After   

I ended up getting two styles of white and light tan baskets for the shelves (to coincide with the colors of the poles and shelves) and nice baby-sized wooden hangers from the Container Store! We’re using the bins to store extra bedding, blankets, and baby items we don’t need to use quite yet (bibs, a baby carrier he’s not big enough for yet, etc).

It came out perfect and is such a better use of storage space!