Frugal Baby - Fun Nursery Ideas

Here's some fun ways to decorate for your baby on a budget.

• Frame pictures from children's books for inexpensive art they'll love. You can find books at thrift stores for pennies. This is also a good way to use books if baby has eaten a couple of pages but you don't want to throw them away!
  
  
• Use blackboard contact paper (available anywhere you find contact paper) on the bottom of doors, parts of walls or sides of dressers for a fun temporary chalkboard. When you're tired of it you can peel it right off. This is a great way to camouflage flaws in furniture or walls. You can also buy blackboard paint and paint surfaces to turn them into chalk boards (and make your own chalk board by painting a plywood board).
  
  
• Glue or screw blocks or other toys to dressers instead of drawer pulls.
  
  
• Have a plethora of baby blankets? Drape them over curtain rods for valances, double them over and stitch them to use as pillow cases (don't put pillows in the crib with baby, of course), hang as beautiful wall treatments, use to cover tables, or stitch together to make a bedspread (use coordinating ribbon along the seams).
  
  
• Bundle artificial flowers, stuffed animals or toys together with ribbon and use to swag curtains.
  
  
• Have a zillion small stuffed animals you want to display but hate clutter? Get a few ceiling hooks and a long length of lightweight chain. Swag the chain around the ceiling and use ribbon to tie the animals to the links. Alternately, you could sit them on top of curtain rods over windows.
  
  
• Use your kids' handprints and footprints to decorate. You'll both love it and you get to see those tiny hands later and marvel at how little they were. Besides on walls, you can use them on lampshades, furniture, even fabric for the curtains or such. Use a safe paint and just wash immediately afterwards. To fake the look of baby footprints, make a closed fist and stamp the side of your hand (by the pinkie) onto the surface, then use your pinkie to dot toe marks. Looks very realistic.
  
  
• Paint is less than ten bucks a gallon and is the cheapest way to jazz up a room. You can change the room as often as they like at that price. Use wallpaper border instead of wallpaper for the same effect without the high cost. Fun paint techniques include ragging, rolling, stamping, and even using a feather duster to apply paint. This also covers imperfections in the wall.
  
  
• Use foam stamps to quickly and easily add extra fun to a room. Discount stores have dozens of shapes, from teddy bears to roses to bows to trains, for a buck or two apiece. Get a small amount of paint and you're set. Again, it's so cheap you can change it often. You can also cut out your own from a kitchen sponge with an exacto knife.
  
  
• Buy a roll of removeable wallpaper border and cut out shapes to decorate the walls.
  
  
• If you use a crib (our babies sleep with us), don't forget to decorate the ceiling! Use wallpaper cut-outs, stamped shapes or glow in the dark stars to give baby something fun to look at.

Most of all, have fun! Really, decorating is more for us than baby. After all, a baby's favorite things to look at are mom and dad. Just the same, it's an awfully nice feeling to be rocking that little treasure and look around at the beautiful room you created.

When you can keep your eyes open that is.... but that's another story.


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