Step by step: nursery

The nursery at Womble Hall has a long and interesting history. I had a nursery in the very first house in a bookshelf, but I didn't have time to develop it properly. I remember having problems with the bed because I simply had no idea about how to make a bed.

In my cabinet house, I didn't have space for a nursery. I had to sacrifice something, and as the nursery at that point was least developed, I sacrificed it. Instead, I made a nursery room box.

Then I moved the nursery to Helen Hall, a Playmobile house that a friend first gave me and later, when I had bought all the missing parts and renovated and decorated it, wanted to have back. So the nursery returned to a room box, although by then I had made something else in the original box and had to use a different one:

This was before I could even imagine that within a few months I would have a huge house with nineteen rooms where there would be space for a proper nursery. This looks temporary and unfinished, and it was. I had never really invested in this project, just put in things that happened to come in large lots or randomly bought at flea markets.

When I started working on Womble Hall, the most natural place for the nursery was obviously in the attic, and I planned it so from the beginning. Yet it was one of the last rooms I got down to, and for a long time it looked almost like the picture above: bare walls and a heap of objects. As with the rest of the house, I decorated as much as possible on flat surfaces, and when I finally assembled the house, inserting the door all the way back was quite a job.

The wallpaper is a printie from Jennifer's website, which I tried in various sizes. There is a disadvantage with this wallpaper because it is a bit distracting, but I like it. Most of the old furniture is still there, and some is out of scale. The table is a cheap piece from Poundland, the bed is too large, the corner cupboard is a Lundby, and the cabinet on the left is Playmobile. The little fireplace is a plastic one that I upcycled. But someone told me they would kill for this rocking horse. It came with a job lot from ebay.

I then added an Adam ceiling as I did with all other rooms.

When I came to making proper furniture for the nursery, I used a couple of Chippendale kits to make a bed and a cabinet.

This is what it looks like now.

There are lots of lovely objects that have accumulated over the years, but I don't know how to display them better. Chaos is natural in a nursery, and there is a limit of how many objects I can put in the foreground. Maybe I should just move them around every now and then. This room is above eye level so you need to use library steps to have a look. Perhaps making this effort also encourages the visitor to look more closely.