Before and After: This Nursery Gets a Bold, Pattern-Mixing Look for $1,000

Some spaces at home are easy to fill: You know a kitchen has to serve as a cook space, and you know a bedroom has to have a bed. But sometimes the odd and undefined spaces at home can present a bit of a design conundrum.

At Lindsey Leger’s home, that head-scratching space was a small room between two bedrooms. It had no door and no closet, so it wasn’t really a bedroom — but it was also pretty sizable, so definitely had potential. At first, Lindsey used it as her home office; then, when she and her husband redid their bedroom to move her desk there, it became a catchall space.

When Lindsey found out she was pregnant, she and her husband debated whether to turn their second bedroom into a nursery or leave it alone, so they’d have a space for guests to sleep. “We opted to keep the guest room as is, so that one of our moms could come stay for a while after the baby arrived,” Lindsey says. That meant this in-between space would need to become a nursery.

The first thing Lindsey did was remedy the “dark, depressing blue-gray color” on the walls. She painted over three of them with leftover light gray paint she’d used in the rest of the house (Sherwin-Williams’s Agreeable Gray).

“I intended to paint an olive green accent wall on the wall that now has wallpaper, but ran into some setbacks there,” Lindsey says. “When this room was set up as an office space, my husband slapped up some of those adhesive felt boards on the wall (for hanging up pictures, notes, etc.) and the adhesive absolutely would not come off the wall.” Lindsey tried steaming, scraping, sanding, and more, none of which did the trick. Finally, she realized she had two options: either re-do the drywall mud in that area and paint over it, or put up some wallpaper. “I got to a point where I just wanted this done and the wallpaper seemed easier,” she says.

While she’d initially planned on a darker color, she ended up picking up this gray-and-white pattern at Lowe’s. “The good thing is, this stuff is actually removable, so I can always change it later on,” Lindsey says.

Once the walls were done, she focused on furniture. The crib was gifted by a friend, and Lindsey found some shelves at IKEA that matched her Target dresser. “The rest was repurposing things we already had and decorating,” she says. Colorful touches — like woodland-patterned curtains and a geometric blue-and-white rug — help tie it all together, for a total cost of about $1,000.

“We live in New England, so I love that the room has plenty of color to make it less dreary,” Lindsey says. And now, the space that was once ill-defined has true purpose (and style to match!).

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This post originally ran on Apartment Therapy. See it there: Before and After: A Catchall Storage Space Becomes a Sweet Nursery for $1,000