Lighting from IKEA being used for the nursery with a woodland animal theme.
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Lighting was a huge issue for the baby’s nursery because there is only one window for natural light. The other three bedrooms have better light, but I chose this one for the nursery because it’s a bit darker and hopefully would help the kids sleep. G has a 6pm bedtime so this summer that’s been especially nice.
The difficulty we’ve had with lighting is that we don’t want to spend the money to have an electrician come install a ceiling fan/light; there’s no electrical wiring.
The OTHER difficulty is that our child LOVES lights. He especially likes floor lamps which he will beat against the wall, tip and knock over, and then recently he wants to try to take the light bulbs out.
As you might guess, we don’t have many floor lamps anymore… partially for safety reasons and then partially because he destroyed them all (and left marks on our walls, sigh). Those lamps do NOT hold up against a persistent toddler very well.
I have a couple lights that I got from Ikea that are really pretty, but don’t throw out a lot of light so I was hoping to get something a bit brighter to lighten up the nursery.
I also don’t want a TON of lights in the room because we don’t want to have to turn them all on and off all the time. They can’t be too close to G’s range because he might get at them and I don’t have many high tables or ledges in that room.
I also.. uh… try to cover up all the electrical outlets that are actually in use… seeing he’s also fascinated with those and hacked EVERY outlet cover on the market; my favorite outlet to use is located behind his changing table/bureau which is mounted to the wall, ha. Safest outlet in the room! And a big part of the lighting was making sure certain items were keyed to the light switch and others weren’t (ie. the clock).
The first item I picked up was a cool column from Hobby Lobby. I used a 40% off coupon on it so it went from $34.99 down to $20.99. Yay. I put that in the corner behind the rocking chair so it was harder to get at/tip over. I’m going to move the hanging light from above the rocking chair and then use a table lamp in that corner. It’s high enough that it should be fairly safe- especially tucked behind the chair. If I have trouble, I may try to figure out a way to wall mount that column.
Next I went back to Ikea to get some different lights. These are the two I picked up:
The ceiling lamp is really large and throws off a lot more light. It really brightens the room. I made sure that it is connected to the switch so that we can turn it on and off when we come and go from the room. Perfect.
You can see that I still have a ceiling light in the corner; I need to take that down. I’m probably going to use that somewhere else as these two lights seem to do the trick for lighting. I also still have the light that matches with our old nursery set- I need to take that out of room, but haven’t taken the time to get it out yet.