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Introducing Anselm’s Room

Okay, I know I still have lots more to tell you about my closet makeover, like how we made that little crystal chandelier, but I want to switch gears today and talk about another project I’m working on. ‘Cuz I just wanna.

So I have this beautiful friend, Erin:
Erin
…who I met last year when she took these photos for our family.

I had never met her until we hired her as a photographer, but we hit it off and I’ve had so much fun getting to know her better. She’s not only a talented photographer, but also crazy stylish and cool. She’s the kind of girl who makes style look easy, who collects things you never would’ve thought to buy, and brings them together in ways that are interesting and whatever-the-opposite-of-cookie-cutter-is.

(I’m begging her to let me post a tour of her house for you! I might make that a condition for our friendship. I like my friendships to be conditional.)

Erin’s house is funky, vintage, muted and soothing, but – the ultimate, in my opinion – it’s interesting. Every single corner of her house draws you in and makes you need to look closer. It’s furnished with antiques and vintage finds, there are cuckoo clocks and old wooden toys, meaningful trinkets and hidden details.

It’s completely the opposite of how I decorated my house, and/but I love it. Our styles couldn’t be more different, but I could stare at her stuff all day.
erins family
Erin and her husband just had their third beautiful little boy. She and I are working together to pull together a muted, vintage-inspired, textural nursery on a TINY TINY budget for her new baby boy Anselm (named after Anselm of Canterbury). By “working together,” I mean that Erin is brilliant and didn’t need me at all, but she’s letting me be part of the process because it’s fun, and since I can’t get my baby-fever fix from her actual baby all the time, at least I can play with a nursery makeover.

This is the “before.” Erin and her hubby have been fixing up their house for a while now, and they installed that cool aged wood situation around the windows, and all the flooring.
anselm room before
The wood wall feature is totally staying. It rocks. The ceiling fan is functional and we live in the South, so it stays too.

This is the opposite corner:
anselm room before-4

It’s a tiny little room but it has lots of potential!

Here’s where we’re headed. We’re working with a very muted, soft color scheme like this:
color

Design Seeds

Erin already has a crib we’ll be reusing, and here are a few of the other elements we’re planning to bring in:
Muted nursery for a baby boy!
We’re going to try to make that rug! Fingers crossed! We’re also planning to create a little canopy reading nook for her two older boys to play in while she tends to the younger one.

Overall, the plan is to keep it very muted and neutral, bringing in interest through texture. It’s kind of a sepia-toned feeling, know what I mean? And when I twist Erin’s arm enough to get pictures of the inside of her house, you’ll see that it’s a feeling that fits well with the rest of her house.

And if you’ve been reading here for any amount of time, you know this ain’t gonna be no expensive makeover. We’re hoping to do it all for a few hundredish total. That means there’ll be DIY tutorials and ideas that’ll hopefully be copy-able in other, non-nursery rooms too.

When it’s all said and done, hopefully there’ll be a nice, cozy chair for me to sit in when I come to her house and borrow her floppy newborn so I can obsessively smell his little head and touch his soft squishy cheeks. I mean for Erin to sit in while she nurses or whatever. I’m not creepy.

What do you think about the plan? You guys always have amazing suggestions! Anyone working on a nursery right now?



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Comments

  1. How exciting! I love projects like this 🙂

  2. Dear Erin. Kelly will do a wonderful job on baby’s nursery. And just let her do a tour of your house to satisfy the curiosity of her readers, she will be much easier to hang with if that happens.

  3. You are going to “make” that rug? Ooh, this I gotta see. Erin and her family are adorable. Hope she lets you photograph her spaces. The little peeks above have my curiosity all perked up.

  4. Awww. Come on Erin, let us see! I won’t be able to sleep now all because of you. I can’t stand missing a preview of a great looking home. OK, I’m really curious too. lol It would be such a treat for all us girls! I love, love, love the color palette. I am so glad the color choices for kids rooms no longer have to be primary or pastels. One extreme or the other. Can’t wait to see the finished room!

  5. Can’t wait to see it come together, I love the suspense! Usually because when all is said and done, your projects are beautiful!

  6. Can’t wait to watch this! Then you can come over and help me turn a teeny corner of my bedroom into a nursery. In exchange, you can hold my floppy newborn in the middle of the night when he shows up in June. Would that be too creepy, hanging out in our bedroom in the middle of the night? We’ll really have to work on the illusion that it’s a separate room, just for your comfort 🙂

  7. this is going to rock! can you use the dresser that is already there? it’s nice oak and it would be a shame to paint it, but whatever, paint that sucker if it works!!! it looks to be a great changing table height, too.
    i’ve seen tons of rocking horses in my time, too, at goodwill. bet you can thrift one of those babies. or just get him a real pony. he deserves it.

  8. The best comment is about the ceiling fan. Agree they are a must in the south. It’s okay I’d rather have a more mild winter and need a ceiling fan than have a chandelier and have to wear a giant coat 9 months out of the year. Although I’d probably rather just have San Diego weather all the time. Clearly they are winning all year long.

  9. Ahh! I totally want to see the rest of the house!

  10. Sigh. Nurseries are the best! And I never get to decorate one again (well. knock wood). So I will be following along with great, bittersweet interest!

  11. How fun! I can’t wait to see it. Love the muted colors you are using as an inspiration.

  12. I want Erin’s shoes! I mean, based on that alone, this room is going to be awesome.

  13. Love that color scheme and entire plan! It’s going to be amazing. 🙂 I love it when our friend’s have such different styles but totally rock it!!!

  14. Oh, great idea!! I need to find a nursery to makeover so I can hijack someone’s newborn! (love the color scheme too 🙂 )

  15. what a fun project! and it’s so nice to make new friends, i dont know about you, but i rarely make new friends now that im not out in the social world all the time, so i like to treasure my new friendships 🙂

  16. love nurseries. we just moved and i’m trying to wrangle all of the ideas floating around in my head to come up with a sweet nursery for my boy. he’s getting too big for the pack-n-play. like seriously is over the weight limit by a few pounds. winning at motherhood.

  17. I was a little sad at the end to be minus an after photo but I understand the suspense element you’re playing with here. I love love love the ‘wood corner’ especially because it’s different and sets the tone when you walk in that room. Love the color pallet which will look great with the wood also. I always enjoy something with the baby’s name in a nursery. Also, maybe some sepia photos or even the one from above, maybe the boys can make some artwork for the room?

  18. Absolutely love that muted soft color scheme. Can’t wait to see how this turns out.

  19. Part 2 is like in 5 minutes, right? Brilliant ideas can’t wait to see it all together .

  20. I love this plan! Such earthiness. I can dig it.

Trackbacks

  1. […] brings me to Anselm’s reading nook. Look how cute it turned out! You might remember from this post that my friend Erin is doing a nursery for her new baby boy Anselm. She created this little reading […]

  2. […] my friend Erin’s baby boy, Anselm, the one whose nursery we’ve been talkin’ about lately. Here’s the before: And this was our little plan for his vintage, calming nursery: Ready to […]

  3. […] was exhausting and addicting, and when Erin asked me if I wanted to do it again, I said yes so hard and so fast. We weren’t planning on […]

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