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Home › Articles › Preparing for Baby › Make Way for Baby

Make Way for Baby

Ideas to Create More Space for Your Newest Addition

By Shel Franco

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Parents spend a good portion of their time dressing and undressing Baby. No wonder a well-made, sharply-painted and highly-priced changing table gets added to so many shower gift lists! The truth is, changing tables take up just as much space as a dresser, and they really aren't as crucial as they seem. "A changing table outgrows its purpose in 18 to 24 months, but a dresser with a changing pad on top can be utilized for years," says JoAnne Lenart-Weary of JoAnne Lenart-Weary Interiors in Waterford, Pa.

"Rather than have a changing table, I used a dresser that fit right in [my son's] wee little closet," says Michele Lightfoot of Manteno, Ill. Once she moved the table into the closet, she realized a whole new world of storage was within arm's reach. "I left the door on the closet and hung a shoe organizer on the inside," she says. "It had clear pockets, and I used it to hold lotions, socks, booties, etc. The closet shelf held extra diapers and wipes. He only had a few outfits that needed to be hung up, so I just put them in my closet."

Think Non-traditional
You might be amazed at how much space you never knew you had. Closets, storage rooms, pantries and mud rooms can clean up quite nicely. "As most standard closets are 6 feet long, you have plenty of room to fit in a 54-inch crib and a small chest of drawers for storage," Lenart-Weary says. "Just remove the closet doors and the closet hardware and paint or paper the interior of the closet to complement the adjoining room." When you add a large tension rod to the doorframe, she says, you can use tab-top curtains for privacy.

Brette Sember of Clarence, N.Y., found that creating the perfect nursery space was little more than a juggling act. "I could not give up my office since at the time I was practicing law from there," Sember says. "The small storage room upstairs was being used as our [oldest] daughter's playroom. We emptied it out and made that the nursery. We then converted her large closet into the playroom." She soon realized that everything she had for Baby wouldn't fit into the storage-room-turned-nursery. So she opened her mind and found the space she needed in other areas of the house. "We put the rocking chair in the hallway outside the room, [and] all of the baby toys ended up in the living room," she says.


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