If you're keeping up with me on Instagram you'll see that I'm taking nesting to many extremes as we renovate our kitchen just a few weeks before our due date. Additionally we've done an entire master bedroom update as well. I am excited to share the changes we have made to our master bedroom to create a nursery nook for our soon-to-be fourth member of the Viklund family. Read on for photos & details about the changes we made & the approach we took to creating our nursery nook.

Living in a 1,400 square foot two-bedroom historic home has posed many unique challenges that I have actually come to enjoy problem solving around. When we learned we were expecting our second baby we knew we'd need to think creatively to create a space for him that would work with the rest of the current flow of our family. Since Buddy sleeps 10-12 hours a night, having our two boys share a room is something we won't explore until baby number two is doing the same. A master bedroom nursery nook seemed like the best option (actually Buddy had stayed in our master bedroom until he was around 5 months old) since it's recommended anyway that babies spend the first year of life in their parent's room. Our master bedroom however didn't exactly have that much space (at the time we started thinking about this) because when we moved into our home we created an open closet using a third of the room for my clothing & accessories. Since I've spent the last year trying to downsize our possessions & live with less, this was the perfect motivation for me to actually tackle my wardrobe & pair it down in a way that was still functional & relevant to my lifestyle but that gave our room more space to add the nursery nook. With some small changes like swapping out a bookshelf for a dresser under the TV to larger changes like downsizing my wardrobe to less than half its original size (+ some under-the-bed storage tubs for seasonal items) we were able to create a space that now feels less cluttered, more open & features a home for our next baby to spend his first months of life in.

With a new baby on the way we have also been very thoughtful about how to make our changes budget friendly. We moved the shelf & clothing bar originally hanging in our bedroom to above our laundry machines, which gives us a perfect space for hanging clothes that need to air dry and storing laundry materials. We donated the bookshelf to a homeless vendor for the Curbside Chronicle who had requested one on his holiday wish list & found the new (to us!) dresser second-hand at a thrift store. My new clothing rack was a $35 Amazon score & we opted for a mini crib from Babyletto that we can fold up when we aren't using it (which was half the price of a full-sized crib). We have also donated many unused items & I am hoping to sell the last of my unworn clothing items on Poshmark.

Beyond the functional changes we made some slight style changes to help the space feel calm & serene. Painting the walls white made the space feel brighter & more spacious. We wanted there to be an intersection of "baby" space & "adult" space so we included a few baby items that lean more on the sophisticated side versus babyish. We added a larger rug from Lorena Canals (bonus, it's machine washable!) to help the space feel more like one & I also added touches of pink to create a non-traditional color palette. When Buddy was a baby I wore him around in the Solly Baby Wrap for a good portion of his first 6 months. I knew with this baby that I would want to do the same (& likely even more so while chasing Buddy around!) so an organized space for all of my baby wraps (I love the Solly Baby Wrap, the Sakura Bloom ring sling & the Wild Bird ring slings) was a must for the nursery space. We finished everything off with plants, meaningful art pieces & books & a geo moon light that doesn't require an outlet (since our west wall is completely absent of one) but will still allow us to have some non-disruptive light when the baby is sleeping. All of these components come together to create, what we feel, is the perfect shared space for baby & us.

For the baby, we wanted to be very intentional about selecting items of meaning for his new space. The "Cow Jumping Over the Moon" ceramic art is from my baby nursery, the books are spin-offs of some of Buddy's favorite books, the NYC rattle we got for Buddy during our trip to NYC where I first had a hunch I might have been pregnant again (& actually tried to take a pregnancy test but the first store I stopped at didn't sell any so I wrote it off as a sign that I wasn't), a buffalo print that is significant to our Oklahoma lifestyle & also connects to the faux buffalo taxidermy head in Buddy's nursery. These little things have been exciting the curate for our next baby boy as a space of his own. We are also assembling a small rolling cart that will house diapering supplies, clothes & burp cloths that we can move about as we need.

Buddy's nursery will eventually be shared with his younger brother & we will tackle that when the time comes. But for now most of the clothing for both boys will still take residence in Buddy's room as will the majority of toys & baby items. If you want to see more of Buddy's nursery (back before Buddy was born) you can check out the Project Nursery feature Baby Viklund's Cool, Calm & Eclectic Nursery.