Okay, I know I still have lots more to tell you about my closet makeover, like how we made that little crystal chandelier, but I want to switch gears today and talk about another project I’m working on. ‘Cuz I just wanna.

So I have this beautiful friend, Erin:

…who I met last year when she took these photos for our family.

I had never met her until we hired her as a photographer, but we hit it off and I’ve had so much fun getting to know her better. She’s not only a talented photographer, but also crazy stylish and cool. She’s the kind of girl who makes style look easy, who collects things you never would’ve thought to buy, and brings them together in ways that are interesting and whatever-the-opposite-of-cookie-cutter-is.

(I’m begging her to let me post a tour of her house for you! I might make that a condition for our friendship. I like my friendships to be conditional.)

Erin’s house is funky, vintage, muted and soothing, but – the ultimate, in my opinion – it’s interesting. Every single corner of her house draws you in and makes you need to look closer. It’s furnished with antiques and vintage finds, there are cuckoo clocks and old wooden toys, meaningful trinkets and hidden details.

It’s completely the opposite of how I decorated my house, and/but I love it. Our styles couldn’t be more different, but I could stare at her stuff all day.

Erin and her husband just had their third beautiful little boy. She and I are working together to pull together a muted, vintage-inspired, textural nursery on a TINY TINY budget for her new baby boy Anselm (named after Anselm of Canterbury). By “working together,” I mean that Erin is brilliant and didn’t need me at all, but she’s letting me be part of the process because it’s fun, and since I can’t get my baby-fever fix from her actual baby all the time, at least I can play with a nursery makeover.

This is the “before.” Erin and her hubby have been fixing up their house for a while now, and they installed that cool aged wood situation around the windows, and all the flooring.

The wood wall feature is totally staying. It rocks. The ceiling fan is functional and we live in the South, so it stays too.

This is the opposite corner:

It’s a tiny little room but it has lots of potential!

Here’s where we’re headed. We’re working with a very muted, soft color scheme like this:

Design Seeds
Erin already has a crib we’ll be reusing, and here are a few of the other elements we’re planning to bring in:

We’re going to try to make that rug! Fingers crossed! We’re also planning to create a little canopy reading nook for her two older boys to play in while she tends to the younger one.

Overall, the plan is to keep it very muted and neutral, bringing in interest through texture. It’s kind of a sepia-toned feeling, know what I mean? And when I twist Erin’s arm enough to get pictures of the inside of her house, you’ll see that it’s a feeling that fits well with the rest of her house.

And if you’ve been reading here for any amount of time, you know this ain’t gonna be no expensive makeover. We’re hoping to do it all for a few hundredish total. That means there’ll be DIY tutorials and ideas that’ll hopefully be copy-able in other, non-nursery rooms too.

When it’s all said and done, hopefully there’ll be a nice, cozy chair for me to sit in when I come to her house and borrow her floppy newborn so I can obsessively smell his little head and touch his soft squishy cheeks. I mean for Erin to sit in while she nurses or whatever. I’m not creepy.

What do you think about the plan? You guys always have amazing suggestions! Anyone working on a nursery right now?