Nursery Budgets: DIY versus Store Bought

Once you know what you have to work with, now it's time to figure out a color scheme. I personally began by looking at various online bedding sets. I thought I might be able to get away with picking and choosing pieces - possibly even clearance pieces and then adding to them solid colored accessories that were cheaper. In the end that didn't work for me.

We painted the room because after two other boys, the white walls were in desperate need of a face lift. Home Depot had a sale where they were clearancing out their Ralph Lauren paints AND you got a rebate for buying any gallon. Together my husband and I chose a medium to dark tan color that we thought would be a good base for whatever color scheme we ended up going with and would hide lots of little boy living. The gallon of Ralph Lauren paint ended up costing about $10.

As I looked through bedding set after bedding set, I found myself gravitating towards bold stripes and polka dots. There were a couple of sets at Target I liked, but unfortunately they were being clearanced as I was deciding and were not available when I was ready to purchase. Amazon also had a Dr. Seuss set that appealed to me . . . all that is, except the Dr. Seuss part of it. However, I was able to take those basics and go to the fabric store with an idea of what I was looking for.

This is what I came up with  . . .

Using coupons, I purchased about 3 yards of the stripes and 2 yards of the polka dotted material. (We happen to find it on sale at Hobby Lobby.) I spent about $25.

I had already found a similar patterned crib bumper on clearance at Target for about $6 - that is WAY cheaper than what the material would have cost to make one.

The bumper was a bit brighter and lighter than the material I had purchased, so my husband helped me tea stain it so that it would be just a few shades darker all the way around. (HINT: If you try to tea stain something, know that natural fibers like cotton will take the darker color almost immediately on contact. However, materials like polyester are fairly resistant and may not retain much of the stain after being rinsed and washed.)

Using the stripes on top and the polka dot material on bottom, I created a curtain pattern with a ratio of 2/3 stripes to 1/3 polka dots. I had my husband help me measure from the top of the window to the floor and then I added three inches for seams (one for the top, one for the bottom and one for the seam where the two different materials met).

The fabric I had purchased was 45" wide so I decided the easiest thing would be to make each panel 45" wide. I did still hem them just to make it look "professional" though. We debated several different ways of finishing them - doing a pocket for the rod to slide through, using fabric ribbon to create a tab top effect, etc. In the end, we decided the easiest, simplest decision would be to hem the top edge and use curtain clips to hang it on the curtain rod.

The baby armoire was repainted in coordinating colors so that along with the blue bed and the black bookshelf, the furniture now matched the color scheme as well.

Lastly I wanted to find something to go on the walls as that always seems to be the missing piece of the puzzle for me when I'm decorating. When I moved my two other boys into the same room, we had taken down a large canvas they had "painted" a couple of years ago. It now didn't match any of the rooms and my husband was never a fan of the art it represented anyway.

I had a large amount of material left over from other sewing projects and thought I could somehow cover the canvas to match the new nursery. When I finally settled on fabric, I realized nothing I had was really going to coordinate except for a large piece of brown cotton. With some help from family, we took the material that I had chosen for curtains to the fabric store and began matching it. We did our best to find the cheapest materials possible and only cut an 1/8 to a 1/4 yard of each - most of these cost us about $1.

When we got back to the house, we cut the brown fabric just a bit larger than the canvas. We eyeballed it, but I would allow for about 2-3" on all sides in order to wrap around the edge and allow you to fix it to the back of the wooden frame. Then we laid out the brown fabric and cut our new multicolored scrap fabrics into strips, arranging the strips to coordinate with the striped material we had purchased.

I used various stitches to attach the strips and then washed the whole piece in the washing machine to let the edges fray. This party could have been done more efficiently I believe because it took forever for me to "clean up" the frayed edges as they had shed everywhere on the piece during the washing process.

Then Joey helped me cut a large "W" for Weston out of the polka dot material I had left after completing the curtains. I wanted this to be a bit neater so I tacked under the edges just a bit before pinning it to the background. (Please note that this is "art" and as such is not perfect - and not meant to be. Thanks.)

Then I sewed it down and stapled it to the large canvas I had leftover from my oldest boy's room. This is what the final product looked like.

One more post to recap How to Make the Most of the Money You Spend on a Nursery . . . and then on to getting this baby home from the hospital and into this nursery.