Do You Really Need a Nursery?

• The closest any of my husband’s and my children came to a nursery was with our first child. We didn’t have space for a nursery with our second child and it would be too much work to create a nursery for our third. I don’t see the point of a nursery although some people I know have been totally taken aback by my attitude. However my friends that know me well aren’t too surprised by my decision to just keep the baby in our room. It is easier to deal with night feedings and changes to have the baby so close.

• I am so grateful for this post. I am newly pregnant with our first and it came just a bit sooner that we thought it would. My husband and I started our own businesses this year, his just a month ago, and while we financially can afford a house, we won’t get approved for a mortgage for another year. We are in a tiny apartment now and there is no way we can do a nursery. The idea of this is kind of killing me because I feel like we are being selfish and at least one of us should just go get a steady income job. But I know this risk will be better for us in the long run and I know we can have a happy, healthy baby nursery-free.

• I’m so glad I found this. I’ve felt bad and sort of embarrassed because my baby won’t have a nursery. We live in a small home. We honestly don’t have the space for a nursery. Also nursery furniture is expensive. I would rather wait until they are about 5 and let them decide what their room will look like too. My “Nana” offered for us to use a handmade bassinet that she slept in as a baby. Its the perfect size to put beside our bed. I can buy a sleeper seat to use in the living room. I think that will be enough. I don’t see the point in spending hundreds on crib bedding. Also I don’t think a changing table is essential. All of my friends say they don’t use the nursery or the changing table. I know I won’t regret skipping the nursery.

• I guess if you have a good back, skinny parents, and an easy singleton all the simple mattress on the floor business would work just fine. But with arthritis, having survived horrible sleep issues with my first two in minimalist conditions, a bedroom I can’t even fit a dresser in, let alone a crib, and with twins on the way and being a bit older, I am going to make a nursery for the first time. A whole separate dedicated space! We have been bed-sharing, room-sharing parents for the first two, but we are the worse for wear and I think twins are a whole new ball game. Plus, no way can this back get down and up from the floor ten times a day. Work-height furniture it shall be. So don’t judge the poor old moms who can’t hack the floor, okay?

  • Skye – no judging. Ever. I don’t write here to judge others but to share choices and get more ideas for simplifying from others.
    Also, I don’t know how long we will last with a bed on the floor. We’re older and tall and it’s a workout getting up from the floor every morning 🙂
    Congratulations on the twins!

• I am up late tonight because I was on Pinterest. I went down a decor rabbit hole and emerged among baby things and nursery decor. I began to feel tears well up. We travel for work, my husband is a pipeliner and since our 15 month old came home, it’s all been temporary homes, no nurseries.

  I waited a long time for my first and always thought I would have a home and a nursery for my baby but life had it’s own plans. The only man I fell in love with travels for a living and we feel it is important to stay together as a family.

  Our daughter is a co-sleeping baby and loves it. When she was 7 months old we were able to get a rental and it had a spare room just the right size for a playroom. Since we live out of bins and only with what we need, we had much room for her to learn to walk, and she did at 7 months. No furniture to bump into or hold on to, strong legs, good balance!

  The spare room has only her toys and books. I decorated it with a banner of vintage flash cards clothes pinned to yarn and a construction paper butterfly. Screw Pinterest, it’s the Joneses online with apps even! This article brought me back to what is important.

• Thanks for sharing! I’m having my second and am just thinking a pack n play or bassinet in our room. With my first, we barely used the nursery, I nursed, and we co-slept. So it just seems like money, time, and stress that can be put somewhere else. Although I do feel outside pressures about this which seems funny! Even an offer, very generous, to do it for us.

• Hi
  I have not commented in a while as I have been trying to help my oldest figure out the college admission process.. trying ot keep it simple, though!
  I have been decluttering more with Spring cleaning about to commence and I thought that one of the items I recently parted with would be of interest to you . My grandmother had bought me a rocking chair from LL Bean when I had my first of four children and I rocked all of them to sleep in that chair. My children are now 16, 15, 13, and 11. No need to rock them anymore!! I had thought about keeping the chair for one of my children when they had babies. So the chair sat in the attic .. waiting. Finally I decided that someone with a new baby could put it to good use and have all of the tender moments I had in that chair. When the time comes I will purchase a rocking chair for my children and not think twice about the fact that I gave my beloved rocking chair away ( hopefully to a new mom). HOpe all is going well with the new baby !

• No nursery for us. We were in a one bedroom condo when my son was born. We added an antique bassinet that was given to us and a changing table (after using a small dresser killed our backs) to our bedroom and that was it. He got his own room a year later when we bought a house. Now that he’s three, I appreciate him having his own room but it definitely wasn’t needed in the beginning.

• We didn’t have a nursery for any of our 3 children. Our first two had a co-sleeper, but neither of them even really used that. My #3 is still in our bed at 15 months. My oldest (almost 7) has a nest on our floor for nights he feels like sleeping “with” us and my middle boy (almost 4) comes to our bed still on occasion.

  I had zero desire to decorate a nursery! I was excited about decorating a children’s room, though. And we’re about to add boy #3 to the big-boy room–at least for the first few hours at night.

• we are just now using the crib we’ve had with all three kids. Baby #3 starting sleeping through the night at 3 weeks in it! Before that, it served as a clean laundry hamper. We would co-sleep with her, but our other 2 are still in bed with us! We are transitioning them to their own bedroom and we went to sleep without them in the bed last night for the first time….ever? And guess what? Instead of feeling liberated, we felt…lonely.

• Hi! I have two young sons and am expecting twin girls arriving any day now. I am curious, would your opinion about a nursery change at all if you were having twins? We did choose to have a nursery this time around after much thought. There are certain things that we need for two babies that we would not need for just one. For instance, a second crib (we choose not to co sleep most of the time), a loveseat for nursing two babies at the same time, and a changing table/dresser for the clothes and items that double the babies requires. In our living situation, currently our bedroom is also a common room area, so without a nursery there would not be a place to take the babies to nurse while my husband gets some sleep at night. I think we would possibly have foregone the nursery if we were having only one child. Before I knew we were having twins, I had ideas about using a couple of drawers out of my dresser in our room for the baby clothes and putting a changing pad on top of my dresser and having the crib in our room. Having twins changes that because there are times when you may need to separate them for sleeping, if you need space for a second bouncy seat and storage for items, etc. I do agree that the amount of baby nursery items on the market and considered commonplace needs now is crazy! We have purchased probably about half of our nursery items used and probably still have less than one of these fancy nurseries have for a single baby! It will be interesting to see how much of these things we actually use and how much ends up being extra. Thanks for posting! 🙂

  • Congratulations! I am a twin 🙂
    I think if I had a twins I would make a dedicated space for them. We have friends with twins and I have heard in the same room they often wake each other up. Not a terrible thing to put up with occasionally when they are older but probably exhausting when they are newborns and feeding so frequently.
    Good luck!

• We did the whole nursery thing with our first and he did sleep in his crib. But, when the second came along a few years later I was too tired to get up with him in the middle of the night so he slept with us. Our oldest was sleeping in the crib with the rail off so it was like a toddler bed. When the second was old enough (around 3) we got them bunk beds which worked out well. When the third one came along she slept with us until she demanded her own bed in her own room. She was also around three. We still laugh about it! It might seem strange to some to have our kids sleep with us for so long, but we slept better and our kids always kind of liked going to bed at night after a long day and they never had nightmares or sleep issues. They are grown now and I still miss those warm little bodies snuggling up to us. I say that all babies really need is someone who loves them and keeps them close.

• We brought our boy home to a bassinette jammed in next to my side of the bed. Except dear Boy was such an incredibly noisy sleeper that we had to wheel him out into the dining room at night – bye bye lovely warm dreams of scooping up the baby and breastfeeding in bed. When he outgrew his bassinette, we put a cot in the dining room but after a few months we were sick of creeping around the house. Lovely Husband had to relinquish the study (despite being mid-PhD). Now we have half a nursery, as it’s still half full of ‘study’ furniture and filing cabinets, and half a dining room, which is half full of computers and books. It works okay but we really need to sit down and figure out a more agreeable distribution of furniture and stuff.

• We will have a “nursery”, but it will double as our spare room. Also, the space is currently being used as junk storage (ack!) so forcing ourselves to get on top of that and actually make it a functional space is a good thing! That said, I loved reading your e-book and it’s been a big help in prioritising what to spend money and energy on.

• We didn’t do anything fancy for any of our babies because they slept in our room – in a little crib or bassinet -for about the 1st year or so. I never thought much of it, except for being asked a half dozen times each pregnancy by acquaintances, “So did you finish setting up the nursery?” 🙂

• We were fortunate enough to receive hand-me-downs for our first child (crib, bassinet, contoured changing pad and covers) and didn’t have to spend the money on those items. We were also in denial (of sorts) about the arrival of baby #1 and live in what I consider a modestly sized home (3 bedrooms….2 while under construction and when baby #2 arrived…and less than 1000 sf). Money and square footage aside, I didn’t want to impose my vision of what my child should like or how they want to express their personality. By the time baby #2 arrived, we had started a construction/addition project that reduced the available number of bedrooms from 3 to 2, so baby #2 slept in a bassinet/in our bed and then in a crib in the same room from July 2011 to September 2012. We’re now back to 3 bedrooms (project(s) not complete, but good enough…). Once baby #2 is ready to transition from the crib to a big bed (we didn’t use a toddler bed for baby #1, actually gave a hand-me-down away and just went with a mattress on the floor), the kids (a boy and a girl) will share a room for awhile.

• I was on hospital bedrest for almost 3 weeks before my daughter was born and never got the finishing touches on her room. When I came home, I had breastfeeding issues and had to pump. Her room was just a changing table, a rocking chair, and a long table for the pump, snacks for me, etc. One lamp + one TV tray. The attached cosleeper we had planned on using in our bed was too hard for me to climb in & out of bed so later we bought a mattress for the floor in her room. And it was fine. She never knew and we were only in that room to pump or sleep anyway. Around 2 we re-did the room but even now it’s just as simple mattress set, shelves for her clothes, and the rocking chair. All her play & toys are done in other rooms so that her room is a place for rest. It’s not at all what I would have thought we’d do based on everything I’d torn out of magazines, etc. but it worked really well for us!

  • Oh! And so often we changed diapers on the floor on top of a towel or whatever anyway so I probably could have ditched the changing table and just put our diaper stuff in floor bins. ha!

• We share our bedroom with our 11 month old and have since birth. He sleeps with us mostly but naps and spends half the night in his mini crib sometimes. We move it room to room as we need to and use it as a playpen sometimes if he just won’t stay out of trouble.

• With our first, I refinished furniture, decorated, set up the crib, etc. in a nursery and proceeded to never use it even once. My hormones kicked in and I couldn’t sleep unless she was very close to me. She slept in our bed and then we added our second daughter two years later. It was so sweet being able to nurse through the night only fully waking up to change a diaper (of course, the first month was crazy). It saved my sanity. For us, we needed a king-sized bed on the floor, a blanket for each person although on the same bed, cloth diapers, a sling, a diaper bag and an exercise ball for one and a rocking chair for the other. For the first, we had quite a few mainstream gadgets that people gave us and we didn’t use in the end.

• We didn’t buy any baby furniture with our first. A bassinet was gifted to us, and I used one of those rolling plastic drawer things that I had in another room repurposed to store his clothes and blankets. We changed him either in his bassinet or on the floor. My in-laws bought us a crib when he outgrew the bassinet (tried co-sleeping and it was a no go for us). I still change him on the floor, especially since he’s 15 months and TOO BUSY for changing!

• Our nursery was a small room nestled right between our room and the guest. We chose a new, firm, full sized mattress on the floor instead of a crib. We took turns snuggling them to sleep and left for our own bed. The room had one pine IKEA dresser we painted white and fastened to the wall. There was a basket of safe toys and board books, a duvet, a large mirror and a short curtain on the closet (so you could see baby inside). We removed the doors and any wires were taped to the back of the dresser before it was latched to the wall. Super baby safe and this was how most of our house was treated. Baby gates on the stairs of course. Really comfy and baby was free to roam. Sometimes they would crawl to our room without crying, just woke up and wanted to explore. =D Pretty cool.

• I never bothered with a nursery and even if I had the money I wouldn’t bother with a nursery next time either. I just don’t see me using one – maybe a nice nursing chair but that is the only luxury item I’d want

• No Nursery in our home. With our first we were given a crib that fit nicely in our bedroom in our one bedroom apartment. She never slept in it, neither did the previous owners kid. I used plastic shelves and containers to hold her things in one of the closets. She is five now, still sleeps with me and is very happy and very smart. With our second child, we borrowed a bassinet and he slept in it for 3 months, then he actually slept in the crib until he was 6 months. Three years later, my kids and I co-sleep and everyone is happy.

• I did have a separate room for each of my kids when they were born, but I didn’t put much in the room. Just a crib and a dresser that was used as a changing table, maybe a mobile. I never understood going crazy on decorating…it was a place for sleeping.

• By the time I had #3 I figured this out 🙂
  We had a playpen set up in our walk in closet in our master bedroom for him to take naps in during the day and be away from the noise of the household…but 99% of the time we co-slept and he never had a crib or a room as a baby or a toddler!
  We just kept his baby clothes in a couple drawers of our dresser and used the top of it for the change table with a piece of foam on top.

• We skipped a nursery, and our son slept in a drawer his first few nights until we received a bassinet from friends (they had promised it to us but never got around to bringing it over). Currently he sleeps in his pack n play in our room, and we’re not in a rush to get him to his own room. Once our housemate moves out in the Fall, we may give her bedroom to the baby, or we might reclaim it as an office/guest room like it was before. For me it was a relief not to feel like I should be designing a gorgeous nursery for my baby who really only wants to look at our faces anyway. We are not really minimalist, but keeping things simple has made our transition to parenthood really enjoyable!

• One bedroom in Manhattan here: I was very stressed about this until I found your site (from your book) while I was pregnant and I became one of the ‘converted’ after that. We did get a crib (that can be changed into a toddler bed) and a changing table from Ikea and had a Rock and Play placed next to my bed (and just about anywhere in the small apt we were until he was starting to sit up in it at 6 months). His crib and changing table, where we store his cloth and disposable diapers, clothes, extra sheets/ pad covers, books etc) are in the living room and he has a small collapsible toy chest that fits under our coffee table from where we switch out some of his toys every few days). We keep his jumparoo in the bedroom near the computer where he hand ‘hang’ with dad during the day. When we have adult company over, it’s very simple to clean up his toys off the floor completely and the Ikea furniture melts into the look of the rest of our apartment. I would say one ‘downside’ of this arrangement is that once he is in bed, the living room (where the TV and cable is) is shut down, but the real upside of that is more board games on the floor in the bedroom or sniggling in bed with nexflix on the computer. Been seriously considering cutting cable out once and for all as a result!

  Every now and then get that feeling of competitive stress where I want to make sure he has his own room by two, what the hell are we doing to do to keep him safe once he is out of the crib and ‘wandering’ around the apt in the middle of the night (tentative plan- move his mattress into our room for nights only and up a gate up at the door so his wonderings are significantly limited to where I will wake up quickly) but reading this post just reminds me how I ALSO used to think I needed a two-bedroom apt before I could even consider having a baby. In the end, a separate room is definitely a ‘nice to have’ but we have really loved being able to have strong, regular interactions with our son and, especially, integrating him from a very young age into an ‘adult’ space so that his transition into learning about what is and isn’t appropriate behavior with objects and furniture, especially other people’s, when we visit will go more smoothly as be starts walking (*fingers crossed!!).

  Thanks for all the inspiration!!

• We haven’t had a nursery since our first! When he was born, we had a small, two bedroom house. We were given a crib from a family member. We put a few decorations on the wall, and I think we had a changing table and dresser in there as well. It seems like forever ago! Our second child made her appearance when our first was 17 months old. None of our children have had their own room since. We’ve lived in a larger 2200 square foot home for a time. Then we sold it and lived with family for three years. When we moved back out on our own, we bought a 1600 sq ft, 3 bdrm, 1 bath house with 4 children (2 boys, 2 girls). We have added two more little ones since, so now we have 8 people (6 children) in a smallish home. I’ve been working on ways to make it work better with so many people running around (if too much stuff is left out, 6 kids can trash a room in seconds flat!). Our littlest munchkin is only 13 months, so she either sleeps in mom and dad’s room or in the living room. So much of what our culture tells us we need is really unnecessary. Too much baby equipment makes me feel claustraphobic. I LOVE blessing others with items we outgrow, and always trusted God to provide if we should need those items again! Having a small mortgage is much better than having a big room to house one tiny baby, and lots of other things we don’t need.

• We moved halfway across the US when I was 6 months pregnant. The smallest bedroom in our new house was painted blue w/ blue carpet. We didn’t know the sex of our baby, so we left it as is. It was a 50/50 chance, and it’d be at least a year before the baby to speak to complain about the decor. All of the baby furniture were given to us by friends who had passed their baby years. She’s 3 1/2 yrs old now. We just bought her a full size bed (so we can sleep guests when they come) and pink polka dot sheets. She never asks about the blue walls. She just loves her pink sheets.

• I didn’t repaint or decorate or anything like that. The neutral wall color was fine and I didn’t feel the need to pick some sort of theme. The one thing I did spring for was a well made, solid wood bedroom set. The crib converted to a toddler bed and then a full sized bed. I liked the idea of having well made furniture that could last until my child moved out of the house and it be something he could take with him. At 4, the bed is in the full-sized stage so it’s big enough for me to sleep with him on nights where he has a bad dream or just needs extra cuddling.
  For a time from about 2.5 until recently, he just slept with me in my bed. I was going through a divorce from my son’s father and he slept better and had less issues during the day if he slept with me. It was what we both needed so it was right for us.

• We are expecting our 4th later this year and we have this same mindset. It’s just not necessary for us to have all that space and furniture for the baby. He or she will be in our room for at least the first year. I will put the crib in a nook in our room in the event s/he wants to sleep there. We will have the pack n play on the first floor for naps and that’s it. No swing, no bumbo, no exersaucer, just a blanket on the floor. It’s just easier for us. We still have a great sling for baby wearing.

• We had a one bedroom apt when our 1st son was born, so we used a pack-n-play with the bassinet attachment, and he slept there for the first six months. The pack-n-play also had a changing pad attachment, which I used on top of my dresser as a changing table. The few decorations I had were gifts. We didn’t have a nursery due to space and money, but I’m glad it turned out that way. When we moved to a slightly bigger place I bought a used changing table on Craigslist, that I later used for toy storage.
  We did the same arrangement for our second son, and after six months we borrowed a crib from a family member and he shares a bedroom with his brother. I also replaced the changing table (the old one was not so safe anymore) and we still use it for toys. I do regret getting toddler beds, they only use them for about a year; it’s better to go from crib to a regular bed with a good safety rail. But none of this matters, because somehow everyone ends up in my bed by morning! 😉

• We bought a crib for our first child and we also used it for the three kids that came after him. The crib used to be in our bedroom for the first year or so. When a new baby came into the house, the youngest child moved out of the crib into a normal bed (we put some pillows on the floor in case it fell out). Our youngest son is almost eight now. He has his own room, but he likes to sleep between us in our bed. He is adopted and lived in an orphanage when he was a baby and if that’s what he needs to feel secure, it’s ok with us.
  What I would NEVER buy is the bed that can be transformed into a desk when they grow out of the bed. When they are old enough to use this desk for their homework, they don’t like desks like that!

• No nursery for us … we had neither space, nor funds, nor the inclination to dedicate an entire room for baby. We did end up getting a crib about a week before our son was born and it was useful when he was an infant, not so much now as he loves co-sleeping. But with son #2 on the way, it will be nice to have a place for him to nap out of reach of his older brother … and as it is convertable, it will eventually become a bed frame once we graduate from our mattress on the floor … or it will go to one of my sisters if they want it!

• I skipped the nursery with baby #2. We had a co-sleeper in our room for sleeping, which worked great for us. I took the doors off one of our closets and made a little baby cubby for her stuff. I got a dresser from craigslist for $20 to use as a changing table and to hold clothes/diapers, and she was all set. For me, while I was nursing, this was so much easier than having to get up and go into another room for feedings or diaper changes. We moved her out after she started sleeping through the night. She was about 14 months old. We also did get a glider, which we moved into her new room and still use for reading and she now loves getting to sit in it and read or rock.

• We have four children in ages ranging 19 to 6, none of them had a nursery! We always just had our babies in our room with us. They had a bassinet to sleep in, but also co-slept with us. And, each child moved in to the kids bedroom in thier own time…some sleeping in the kids room at age 1, my youngest moving out of our room at age 4. I used to feel guilty about not having a baby nursery, but I know that I would much rather have them in our room anyway!

• We skipped the nursery this time too. We replaced my night stand with the dining room buffet (turns out it had only had linens, dishes, and art supplies in it, which all fit fine someplace else). Now its drawers hold baby clothes and cloth diapers, and the top has a changing pad in addition to my lamp and alarm clock. The baby sleeps in a co-sleeper next to our bed, and that is the whole of our nursery. The extra bedroom has been far more useful as a space for visiting guests than it would have been as a dedicated nursery.

• Lately, my 6 and 9 year olds have been talking about not wanting their own room. They have all their toys in the living room, and what they’d prefer if they could move into our bedroom and get a huge bed to fit us all comfortably.

  • I’ve met a family that bed-shares with three kids. And they live in a one bedroom apartment. And home school. I am still working up the guts to ask her if I can interview her for my blog. They seem really happy.
    We have our mattress on the floor and it will stay that way until we don’t regularly have 1 or 2 children joining us in the night 🙂

• Ooh, yes. Our son spent his first six months in Belgium with out furniture, then six months in the Nordics with provided furniture. No fancy nursery here. He has a crib, always sleeps in it. In his room there is also my aunt’s old dining room table, which we inherited, on which we change him. His clothes are in a cupboard (built in) and his cloth nappies live on the table. I made some quilts for him, which we hung in the room. No painting. No lamp. No rugs. It’s just a room furnished with what we need, which isn’t much. I can not believe the ‘sets’ available for baby rooms, but to each their own. We went with what felt right to us. Oh, and there is a provided chesterfield on which I nurse him. It works. He doesn’t notice that it isn’t out of Pinterest, and we don’t care.

  • Like the idea of putting quilts on the wall. I have a gorgeous one my sister made that would like great hung up. Thank you for the idea.

    • You are welcome. 🙂 One of the drawbacks of being a quilter is that one’s walls tend to be covered. There are plenty of free onine tutorials about hanging quilts; basically, a piece of wooden doweling and a few pieces of fabric to sew a tube or pocket hangers, and you’re done. Heirloom quilts should not be hung on outside walls, but otherwise anything goes.

• When our daughter was born, we didn’t have the money for a crib. We did however have an extra drawer in the dresser and an old buffet. So we moved the buffet into our bedroom. It was about table height and made a great changing table. And was long enough to put the empty drawer on it and that is were our daughter slept until she was about 6 months old. I believe she was warmer and more secure in that small drawer than she would have been in a great big (to a 5 lb baby) crib. And she is a very happy, healthy 3 y/o little girl now. No regrets.

  • A drawer for a bed! Very resourceful.

    • My granny (b. 1916) slept in a drawer as a baby!
      But seriously, I am utterly overjoyed that you should have written this post – oh hallelujah and yes, yes, yes.
      I was so lucky to be given a small paperback when expecting my first baby in 1983: it had a chapter called “what you don’t need” and even in my two subsequent pregnancies, a lot of that stuck. Thank goodness.
      I have no idea when baby culture became the way it is now – it horrifies me what an industry having children has become and I am glad mine are grown up, now. Fortunately, my daughter is also pretty sensible with her two kids, though these days, if it was me, I’d be going the whole minimalist hog 😉 😉 😉
      Thank you for having so much common sense!

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