Nursery Compromises… Saving on Baby Furniture

The sticker price of nursery furniture at baby stores left my husband and I shaking our heads. As we stumbled around the isles of Babies-R-Us we found a set of dressers we really liked. The problem: they cost over $500 each.

We added them to our registry, but then quickly decided there was no way we could justify plunking down $1000 on them. Especially when you consider that we still needed to shell out money for a mattress and crib!

So we went back to the drawing board and decided to rethink our options. We had an old dresser in the spare bedroom, but it was stained a dark brown and I really had my heart on a bright and airy yellow room with white furniture.

To be honest I thought about painting the dresser we already own, but I don’t think a coat of paint would have done much for it. In fact, I think it would have made it look much worse than it already does.

It’s an old dresser that was handed down to us by my husband’s family and it’s very old fashioned and just doesn’t seem like the right thing for a kid’s room.

So my husband and I regrouped, considered all of the options and ultimately decided on a trip to IKEA. There we found two dressers that will do the trick for less than half the price. We purchased an 8 drawer dresser and a small chest for just over $400.

When it came to the crib I found that prices ranged anywhere from $150 to well over $1000. My husband and I selected a beautiful white crib that fell on the lower end of the spectrum, ($279 to be exact), but it came with solid reviews from new parents. (As an aside I found that many of the expensive models were rated terribly.)

I considered purchasing the crib from a variety of sources, but ultimately settled on Babies-R-Us because I could use a 20% off coupon I received for registering there. The crib ended up costing us about $230.

I really want to purchase an organic mattress for the little one so I’ve decided that’s the one place I’ll splurge. An organic mattress costs more than double the price of a non-organic one, but I’ve read a lot about the differences and I think in this case it’s worth the extra money. I added price watches to a number of online sites and figure I have between now and October to wait for a sale. If one doesn’t come than I’ll simply order it from Amazon, which seems to have the best everyday price.

When all is said and done we should be able to furnish the baby’s room for about $850. That’s still a chunk of change, but it’s a whole lot less than it would’ve cost us if we stuck with the original plan of buying everything from a big-box baby store.

3 thoughts on “Nursery Compromises… Saving on Baby Furniture”

  1. I had this same dilemma!!! I've made this suggestion but his parents decided to purchase from babies r us.. it would have saved so much had we gone this route. thanks for sharing!

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  2. We bought from IKEA for our baby's room too – SO much cheaper than BRU! I love the white on yellow theme you selected. We did white furniture against mocha brown paint and I love how the white furniture just pops!

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  3. Don't forget the glider – we still use ours with our toddler for reading time. We bought our glider at babies r us, but bought the changing table, crib on craigslist.

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