Colour Scheme Ideas for creating a Beautiful Gender Specific or Gender Neutral Nursery

Part 1 of the Nursery Series looks at some gorgeous colour combinations for planning your dream nursery. It will also look at the trials and tribulations that I had planning a gender neutral nursery.....

When I was pregnant with Mr B, we did not find out the sex of the baby and it just drove me CRAZY!! My husband wanted the big surprise at the end and I very reluctantly agreed. Although he didn't trust me one little bit, and came to every single appointment just to make sure that I didn't find out (and I must admit I probably would have!)

As someone that has to be organised, not knowing the gender drove me in to such a spin as I wanted to plan every last detail of the nursery. I was also due Christmas Day (thankfully B arrived 11 days early), so I had many sleepless nights worrying about getting out of hospital amid peak boxing day sales trying to rush around and finish my nursery.

Now as I mentioned previously, I planned out this nursery before I had even heard of Pinterest (oh the horrors) and the only source of inspiration that I had was trusty google. But each time I would enter 'gender neutral nursery' in to that search bar, I would be presented with loads of beige and brown and this was not the look I wanted for my nursery.

After many more sleepless nights (and cursing my husband for not letting me find out the sex) I decided to go with gender neutral tones of pale grey and white, as I thought that this soft palette would be easy to add accents of colour in to once the baby arrived and the gender was finally known.



I decided that if I had a girl that I would use accents of lavender and lemon to compliment the grey and white scheme, and for a boy I would use turquoise and lemon. But truth be told, I was so convinced when I was pregnant that I was having a boy, that I went ahead and started adding touches of turquoise and lemon ... mother's intuition proved right in this case!

We also have charcoal toned carpet in this room, so I decided that white furniture against this would give me a nice fresh and modern look, whilst making this room a peaceful place to encourage (lots of!!) sleep.

If you are planning a nursery and you don't know what the gender is (or even if you do) then this palette might just be for you. By designing the nursery with these two core colours (and adding accents later), this palette is also great when it comes time to transform the nursery in to a more 'toddler' orientated space.

For Mr B I have already started planning the toddler transformation and I have found that many colours work with the grey and white colour combination.

Red, mid blue, navy and green (not all together!) work extremely well with grey and white, so I am so pleased (and my husband is too, as it means that he won't be painting again). Now the hard part is to decide which to go with when the time comes....

So how did the nursery turn out? Come back tomorrow to have a little peek in to Mr B's nursery :-)

 

Gender Specific Colour Schemes:

I just love putting together little boards with colour combinations, I thought that I would share a few of my favourites for a girl:

And for a little boy:

 

My Tip with selecting a colour scheme

If you are prone to chopping and changing your mind about colour schemes (like me!) then consider a neutral base for the nursery (white, pale grey or cream) and add the accents of your colour to it. That way when you want a change, it is much easier (and cheaper) just to replace the accents that you have added rather than paint an entire room again. You will notice that all of my colour selections above feature one neutral colour that will allow you to do this if you like this idea too - if not, go as bold as you dare!!

When I was selecting colours, I actually picked up paint chips from my local hardware store and mixed and matched until I found the shades that I was after. When I was looking for items for the nursery, I bought my trusty 'paint chips' with me so that I could ensure that the product I was looking at was the right shade rather than being too dark or too light than the other items I was trying to match it up with. This might be a handy little tip for you too!

Don't worry I have plenty more tips for planning a nursery coming up this week!

If you haven't already, don't forget to head on over and enter the Mor-Stor competition here.

What colour scheme did you/or are you using for your nursery? If you have any pictures that you would like to share with the Utterly Organised readers, please email me at utterlyorganised@gmail.com. I would love to feature them!