Can I combine a nursery and office?

[Duv]

I'm currently expecting and me and my partner are trying to work out how we are going to fit a baby in our small flat. We are lucky enough to have 2 bedrooms, but one of these is currently my office. Both my partner and I wfh majority of the time (and I'm guessing once we have a child we will want to continue that to save money on transport and make childcare pick ups easier). Currently I work in the office and he in the living room - he can basically work anywhere as he just needs his laptop, but I really do need a monitor so am less flexible.

Our bedroom is too small to fit a desk in. The office is a reasonable size, it has a single bed in it (which could be useful for one us to get sleep away from a crying newborn?), a desk with monitors, and a lot of storage unit full of our stuff which we have no where else to put. Would it be ok to keep this room as a storage/office room + nursery by adding a crib and some baby storage? I'm thinking that when I'm working in there the baby would be at a childminder/nursery anyway, and people do say baby's don't actually take up that much space? I more worry though when the child starts walking if there are wires everywhere? Is this a feasible solution? Does anyone else basically combine the two?

During the baby stage, yes in theory you can
once the baby becomes a toddler, and you have to put a toddler bed there, or put the kid on the single bed, no way, toddlers need a “baby proofed” room - they do wake middle of the night / very early, get out of the bed and into everything they can
also, after 6 months you may want to move the baby into the “nursery” do you have a space there for the bed, your desk and a cot?
think you need to find a space for your desk either in your room or the living room

Your baby can stay in your room for a year if needs be or even longer so no need to worry about it yet. Please don't be getting stressed about a nursery.

is The spare room bigger than yours? If so, could you move your bed into that room and keep the desk there, and use your current room for the baby and single bed?

In the short term, fine. I don't think we converted DS' nursery to a nursery until he was about 6 months. Once it became a nursery though, it would have been hard to have an office as well partly because there may be times when one of us needed to work when DS was asleep (weekend nap times, evenings, or just doing admin type stuff) but also because he accumulated quite a lot of stuff. From about 2, DS liked playing in his room too.

For a year or so - yes but after that not so likely.

As soon as your baby is mobile, the office part is not baby-proof and has to go.

You will have toys coming and your child may want to play in the room instead of having to drag toys back and forth from the living room.

Could you swap rooms? Change the sofa to a sofa bed if you think you need a spare one and get rid of the single bed?

I wouldn’t if you can help it. Scenarios where that would be shit:

• baby in bed at 7 and you have work to finish off at night
• baby excluded from nursery due to sickness but you can work from home. Baby napping in your workspace (this will probably happen quite a bit).
• baby becomes toddler and dicks around with your laptop.

I worked in my daughters bedroom from when she had just turned one (when Covid hit) until she was 3 (when I went on maternity leave with number 2). It worked well for us. She was always at nursery when I was working, if I had to catch up in evenings I would just take laptop elsewhere. We had a desk, cot and then later a small double bed. Wasn’t a huge room but it all just about fit. She didn’t really keep any toys in there tho, or play in there, but she didn’t ever want to, she’d rather be with us in lounge. You will have to think about safety once she can move, and make sure things are out of harms way, but that’s a while off. It’s doable, or at least it was for us.

It absolutely will be fine for a year or so, especially if play space is somewhere else. It will NOT work with toddlers and then it'll work again when they're a little older. I've had a desk in my eldest's bedroom since she was 6.

Should be fine but I'd be cautious of the space
people do say baby's don't actually take up that much space?
Our place just seemed to fill up with all their stuff. I think they took up more room than us.

You can as long as you don't plan to use it for both at the same time. In our old house, I had a desk set up in ds's room (he would have been between 1-4 when we lived in that house). I tended to work from the kitchen table, but it was useful for after nursery/before bedtime hours when I needed somewhere I could just shut the door and do some work or have a meeting. I could also store some things in the desk as well to keep them from being spread around the house or clogging up space on the dining table. We don't really use dc's bedrooms for playing so they weren't in there unattended except while asleep at night. We didn't use the cot/bed for daytime naps anyway.

Will the baby be in nursery while you work?