It was verging on wintertime in Ohio, and my husband and I were in the process of building a new home. The home buying process is a full-time worry within itself, but what added an interesting twist was the fact that I was six months pregnant … with my fifth child. Talk about an exciting time in the Bell household!
Since we were building the home from scratch, we had a lot of decisions to make. My husband focused on all of the practicalities (of course), while I was deep into the interior design and how I wanted all of the rooms to look. The time came around to when we needed to decide how the fifth bedroom should look, and given that my new bundle was soon to arrive, the room was dedicated to become the nursery.
The nursery was brightly decorated in pink bunny wallpaper with pink accents to match – a perfect color for a baby girl’s room. The room would stay designed this way for a handful of years, and then the bunnies turned into flowers as the baby grew.
About five years later, my oldest daughter was off to college and the room arrangements changed a bit. After she left, an opening for that special pink room occurred, and my brain churned with all of the ideas of what the room could become. I landed on transforming the what will always be called “the baby room” in our house into a guest room.
With the shift into a guest room, the walls found a change in color and went from pink to gender neutral. The floors were changed from carpet to wood, and the little tike bed graduated into an adult size one. Next, it was so long to the toy box and pink girly accents, and hello to a night stand and decor that didn’t involve Spongebob Squarepants.
Several years later when the first child became a mother, the guest room made its way back into a nursery. It was this same time when I wished I had kept some of the items from my own children’s nursery from back in the day. The adult size bed shrunk back into a crib again, and out went the night stand and back came the toy box and baby accents. The bedroom went through a complete 360 – I always favored it as a nursery anyway.

Written by our Recruiting and Retention Coordinator, Christine Bell