Creating the perfect nursery

Although I'm only 17wks (as of yesterday) and it'll be a little while before bubs will actually sleep in the nursery, Ste and I couldn't resist from planning this right from the beginning.

Being super organised, long before we conceived we were discussing what we'd like to do with our spare room, what themes and colours would work well and what we would need to equip the nursery with.

Our small spare room has always had a nice feel to it and already has quite a few practical features:

• It's positioned over the staircase, so there's a cupboard built on top of the part that comes into the room, which has ten shelf spaces inside for plenty of storage and for us to use wicker baskets to store babies clothes, bits and bobs. There's also two drawers built-in which are deep and will be very handy to keep nappies, wipes and cream close to hand.

Spare room as it is (the samari sword will be gone when baby comes, don't worry, and the cot will go where the desk is)

• It has laminate flooring which makes it much easier to keep clean.
• It's west facing so sunlight only comes through the window in mid afternoon, so it never gets too warm or too bright.
• There's four rows of bookshelves, staggered on the main wall on the left, with dividers to create sections, which will be perfect to keep books, pictures and the extra special toys out of harms way and neatly organised.

All we need to really do with the room (aside from find somewhere else to store all the laundry we seem to hoard) is to give it a fresh lick of paint.

The Scheme
As we won't be finding out whether bubs is a he or a she before the big B day, we wanted to choose a scheme that would be gender neutral without being bland. I have a love of children's books and have been collecting traditional tomes and fairy tale collections for a while now. Ste's family have also long had a love of Winnie the Pooh, so we decided that we would display books and toys from these classic stories on the bookshelves and we may also buy some personalised wall stickers, taking quotes from these books.

We weren't really looking to buy a complete look from one store but when we found the collection we have chosen, we just couldn't help ourselves. The bright yet really beautiful Jamboree range from Mamas and Papas caught our eye with its fun characters and combinations of print, purple, orange red and lime tones. Perfect for boy or girl, we have bought most of the Jamboree items, including the following:

Cot Mobile

Nappy Stacker

Cushion

Bunting (you can add letters to this to spell our baby's name too)

We're storing everything at the moment and will probably paint the nursery one weekend soon or over the Christmas break - before I get too big and become relatively useless for DIY! Can't wait to see the whole room dressed.