You recently got the surprise of your life, and suddenly you went from planning for one baby to preparing for two. There’s no way you can fit everything you’ll need for two babies in a nursery that’s already small, but you’re a parent now. This means you’re capable of the impossible, and we’ve found some Twin Nursery Ideas for Small Spaces to help you out. We also found some wonderful gift ideas for helping a new twin parent get ready.

1) Utilize Bifold Doors

If you have a closet, bifold doors are your friend. They’re an excellent way to stay organized when you’ve got two babies to keep track of, and you can designate one side of the closet for each baby. If the twins are going to stay in this room as they get older, it also gives them each their own space. Try making a closet organizer like the one Elsie Larson from A Beautiful Mess made, but instead of having three wide drawers, split them into six drawers so that each child has three drawers on each side.

2) Twin Milestone Blanket

When parents have many children, particularly when they have many young children, they risk losing track of the small moments because they’re busy and tired and have too much on their minds. Remember to keep track of the small moments with your twins. You can get a milestone blanket like this that won’t take up any room, but will give you a way to stop, take a breath, and just be happy with your babies every month as they grow older.

3) Use Nooks and Crannies

Since your nursery is small, you’ll have to take advantage of every nook and cranny, but you might not be sure how to use those little crevices or odd-shaped sections of a room that seem useless. The best way to use a truly difficult space is for storage, particularly if you can’t remodel because you’re renting or in military housing like Kristina Edwards. If you can remodel, go ahead and build shelving units around any odd-shaped area for storage space.

4) DIY Customized Patchwork Quilts

It can be easy for some people to get infant twins or even identical twin children confused. They’re already sharing a small room and barely have anything of their own, so they could easily begin to feel like they’re losing their identity as they grow older. You can help temper this feeling now by making them each something unique, like a patchwork quilt. This won’t take up much space, but they’ll each have a homemade, customized keepsake for when they grow older. You can even use these instructions to learn to make one.

5) Twin Nursery Center

One of the most challenging things about having two babies at once is finding room for not one but two cribs. They’re probably the biggest furniture piece in your room, and the twins probably aren’t sharing one the way they are with the changing table and maybe even their clothes and storage space. You can get a compact twin nursery center like this that has two cribs side-by-side, along with a changing center above them where it doesn’t take up any extra space.

6) Double Closet Rod

Take advantage of your babies’ small size while you can. Since they’re so small, you don’t need a full-height closet rod for them, and you can have two levels of closet rods instead. This is an excellent way to stay organized, even in a small space, since you can have one rod for each child, as described in this Twiniversity article. This is also a place where you can hang storage containers for each baby’s toys or special blankets and gifts to keep them separate.

SEE ALSO: 21 Coral Nursery Ideas

7) Stay Organized

Organizing is vital in any small space since an unorganized area will often include a lot of wasted space. By planning your room, you can make sure you don’t waste an inch and make it so that the room feels bigger than it is by making it easy to access everything you need. No matter what shape your room is, you probably don’t need to cram anything in difficult-to-access places. Take a look at this video from This Suburb Life to get some organizational tips for a twin nursery.

8) Twin Sleeper/Bassinet

A twin sleeper is probably the smallest way to give each of your twins a separate place to sleep. This sleeper, or bassinet, has space underneath so that you can use that area for extra storage. If you can do without that extra space, you can also use the wheels on the sleeper to roll it from one area to another while cleaning. The wheels also mean that you can pace it in front of other furniture and move it out of the way when needed, adding to your total usable space.

9) Separate Cribs

While it’s convenient to have both cribs close together so that you can give attention to both babies at the same time, it also gives the two babies a chance to play together and keep each other from sleeping when they need to. You may want to take this advice from Two Came True and separate the twins’ cribs as much as possible so that they can get to sleep more easily. Since the nursery is small, you’ll probably still be able to get to both cribs comfortably to care for both infants.

10) Use Every Inch

This might seem obvious at first, but it’s essential to figure out how to use every inch of your nursery. This doesn’t just mean to pack it full of furniture, though; you’ll also need decorations, so we suggest decorating with vibrant colors and in unconventional places, as TINAFRENCH did with the undersides of the cribs in this twin nursery. You can have colorful bed skirts like these and use them to cover up your under-crib storage!

11) Convertible Crib

Convertible cribs are ideal for people with a budget, but they’re also valuable for people designing a nursery in a small space. Converting a crib into a bed as your children get older will take up less room in your house overall and keep your budget low since you’re paying for twice as much furniture. This way, you don’t have to buy new beds every few years. We’d suggest getting a mini crib like this that’ll convert into a toddler bed and then a small twin bed as the babies get older.

SEE ALSO: 23 Moon and Stars Nursery Ideas

12) Kitty-Corner Cribs

Corners are the most difficult spaces to use well, and your nursery is small enough that you really can’t afford to waste that corner space. One amazing way to use your corner space well is to place your cribs kitty-corner to each other, as Carly Elizabeth did in her nursery. This creates a corner where you can visit with both children at once and takes up much less room than having the two cribs side by side or on opposite sides of the room would.

13) Parent Seating

Even though you have limited space, you’ll need a place to sit and spend time with your babies, nursery them, or read them stories. If you can find even a little room for a seat, you’ll be glad you did in the long run. We suggest putting the seat between the two cribs like the couple in this Twist My Pretty article did, though you’ll want something smaller than the couch they used. Think about a small armchair; just make sure it’s comfortable!

14) Gender Neutral Closet Dividers

Your babies were born at the same time, but that doesn’t mean they’ll grow at the same rate, so you might find at some point that they each need different size clothing. If you don’t have the space to give them each separate drawers, or if you worry that their clothes might get mixed up, you can get wood dividers like these with size labels on them. That way, you can keep the sizes you need on a clothes rod and put away the rest without having to pick and sort through things.

15) Crib Canopy

You have a small room, and that can create issues if your babies are too close together in their cribs. They can entertain each other at times, but when they’re supposed to be napping, having another baby around might make it harder to get them both to sleep. To prevent this, we suggest getting crib canopies like this one so that they can’t see each other as easily, even though their cribs have to be close together.

16) One Crib

You’re probably planning to have two cribs since you have two babies, but the good news is that you don’t have to do that right away if you don’t want to. If you’d like some time to adjust and don’t want to have a cramped space for the first couple of months with your babies, you can start them off in a single crib. Read this Dad’s Guide to Twins article to learn more about how to put two babies in the same crib together safely and about how long you can do so.

17) Changing Station as Centerpiece

When you first bring babies home, the main things you’ll use the nursery for are changing them and giving them a spot to sleep. Since you only need one changing station but two cribs, we suggest using the changing station as a centerpiece with the cribs on either side of it like the family in this video does. This gives you easy access to both babies while changing one of them and takes up less room than if you have the changing table and cribs side-by-side since you can stand in one place to access all three spots.

18) DIY Under-Crib Storage

You’ll need to make the most of every space you have since you don’t have a lot of room, so we suggest turning everything you can into storage. One of the most classic ways to do this is to build under-crib storage. This is even more useful in a twin nursery since you can use each drawer to store clothes and toys for the baby using that crib, making it easier to grab the correct items without searching. These instructions should help you build your under-crib storage.

19) Mini Crib

Cribs are going to be the largest things you’ll need in the twin nursery, and you’re going to need two of them! That’s why we recommend mini cribs if you can’t find space for two full-sized ones. You can get a mini crib like this that’ll take up a lot less room than any other crib, and it’ll still be plenty of space for each baby to sleep. The crib comes with a mattress and instructions for finding a replacement mattress if you need it, too.

20) Bold and Gender-Neutral

If you’re not sure what gender the twins are going to be, or if you have one baby of each gender, a gender-neutral nursery is probably the best choice. If you go with a gender-neutral nursery, we suggest bold colors since they can make an area feel bigger. Try designing an accent wall like the one in Romy and Piper’s Nursery. It’s gender-neutral with a nature theme, and a wall like that would make the room feel larger.

21) Crib Divider

If you want to go as long as possible before purchasing a second crib or want to have open space for as long as possible before you add a second crib, you can use crib dividers to keep them in the same crib together longer so that they don’t roll into each other. This article from the Bump has advice on how to safely put your twins in the same crib with a divider. Eventually, they’ll need separate spaces, of course, but this will let you get used to the twins and care for them more comfortably for some time.

Did any of these ideas help you plan out your twin nursery? Which ones did you like best? Let us know what you thought in the comments below!