Max & Mila’s Shared Nursery

My kiddos are 23 months apart (Max’s birth story and Mila’s birth story) and while we do have a 3 bedroom house, we decided it made the most sense to have the toddler and baby share a room. We just couldn’t justify giving two tiny humans their own big bedrooms. We are lucky that the bedrooms are fairly large and there is plenty of room for 2 cribs, a large dresser, a glider, and they still have lots of floor space for playing.  We are 3 months into the toddler and baby sharing a room, and so far we’re happy we did it. One of these days I’ll write a post about tips for sharing a nursery because we have learned a few things by trial and error. Just for fun, here is Maxwell’s original black and white nursery!

The crib thing was a big dilemma. Do we move Max to a big boy bed? Leave him in the crib? Buy the baby a new crib? Max loves his crib, he’s very happy in there, and the best part… he can’t (or doesn’t care to try) to get out… at least yet. So, we had decided to let Max stay in his crib and Mila would sleep in our room for a few months and then possibly transition her to a pac n play in the nursery or the living room. We were winging it, folks! About one month before I was due, we were having dinner with friends that have twin 3.5 year old girls. They were ready to transition their girls to twin beds and didn’t know what to do with their red Jenny Lind cribs. So literally about 4 days before Mila was born, we picked up the cribs, gave them each a quick touch up coat of red spray paint and plunked them down in the nursery. Done and done! They even gave us the toddler rails for both cribs so that when Max is ready to transition, we’ve got the rail ready.

As far as bedding went, the only new thing I bought was a bed skirt for Mila’s crib. Since her crib is on the tallest setting you could see the black metal frame of the mattress and well, my sweet baby girl needed something pretty. I splurged and bought this simple white crib skirt with cute black tassels from Pottery Barn Kids. A friend sent Mila the red star blanket which ended up working out perfectly in the new red and aqua shared nursery. My mom made a few crib sheets before Max was born, so we are using those plus a few store bought ones too. Mom tip: You need at least 3 crib sheets per crib especially once you start the potty training phase!

Everything you see in this picture besides the cribs was in the original nursery. We just moved it all around and gave a few things a little update with paint. Here are tutorials to a lot of the original projects in the nursery:

• Black valances made out of insulation
• DIY ledge shelves
• Envelope cushion for bench
• Gallery wall

One thing that did change is the amount of books on those picture ledge shelves. It’s amazing how many books we have accumulated in 2 years! In the early pictures of the nursery, I had picture frames on the shelves becusae there were not enough books to fill them up.

I did take down the black, vinyl triangle feature wall (it was super easy to remove) and relocated the original gallery wall. My favorite addition to the gallery wall is the red sweater that was my dad’s when he was a little boy. My Grand Martha sent it to my mom when she had my oldest brother.

 I love it!

Besides the new to us red cribs, the almost black wall was the biggest change to the space. Originally there was a 3 drawer wooden dresser that doubled as the changing table and the gallery wall was on this wall. I knew we needed a bigger dresser for the shared nursery. While searching for a dresser, I fell in love with this giant old school map! Both the dresser and the map are from a local shop, called Vintage Fresh. If you’re local you have to check it out, Leslie hunts down and re does all of the pieces herself. The wall was begging me to paint it black with that white dresser! It’s actually a dark grey called cracked pepper by Behr. We painted it pencil point first and it was more blue than I wanted. I want to paint more walls cracked pepper!

The rocking horse was a $15 craigslist score, and I gave him a little makeover with a can of Rustoluem Lagoon spray paint in a satin finish. Max still loves his rocking horse, hopefully Mila will too.

The nursery has 2 closets which you might think is perfect since 2 kids share a room, but nope! The kids share a closet and Andy and I use the other one for our things. The Graham glider has been an awesome investment, I use it every single day to read books or nurse the baby or as of late, both at the same time!

I love that all things kid live in this room. Well, that’s not entirely true, we did move one of the toy benches out to the living room so that it covers the fire place and serves as living room toy storage.

Both kids are sleeping in here at night now, and it’s working out really well. I think I’m pretty lucky that Mila was “doing her nights” by 8 weeks old. (Have you read Raising up Bebe? “Doing her nights” is a reference to that book!) Did your littles share a room? Do they still share a room? How long can a girl and boy share a room? Maybe it’s just because I don’t know it any other way, but I love having them share a room!

(Photos by Brooke Taelor)