Making over your child’s bedroom can be a fun and surprisingly simple task. Adding a few bold items or changing the wall colors can make a big difference.
HGTV residential interior designer Lauren Jacobsen advises parents to make sure their kids’ room ideas are age-appropriate and to avoid overdoing the redo. Simple changes often work best.
A themed bedroom
You might be surprised at what your child wants her themed bedroom to look like. Today’s media expose kids to a world of ideas and they are interested in many different things. “Sitting down and talking to them about what they want would be better than assuming,” says Jacobsen.
“You have to be careful when you do a themed bedroom because you want to make sure it isn’t a temporary feeling,” says Deborah Titus, an interior designer for Décor & You in southeastern Pennsylvania and South Jersey.
“Removable wall stickers are nice because you don’t have to repaint the entire wall in a year or two when your child grows out of that specific theme,” says Titus. “Stickers are great because you can occasionally switch them out depending on the season.”
If you have a daughter and a son sharing the same room, discuss a neutral theme with them. “A beach theme could work for a boy and a girl. You could buy really cheap beach pails to hang from the wall and use them as a storage place for small toys or markers and crayons,” says Jacobsen.
Keep in mind that children often have huge imaginations, so be creative. “You can go online and find mini-surfboards to use as shelves and get star-shaped sponges to dip into paint and dab on the wall to represent starfish,” says Jacobsen.
Adding color
Accent walls are a great way of going about dramatically changing a room, “For example, if a child wanted a purple room but you don’t necessarily want the whole room to be dark purple, you can do one wall in an accented dark purple and do the other walls in a lighter purple, like a violet,” says Titus. “You can also bring in accented pieces with dark purple, like your child’s comforter, or you can throw a couple of dark purple pillows on the bed.”
Jacobsen says you can go even farther with colors. “You could even give each wall a different color to help color code the toys or you could color-block the room by getting colors that go together or use primary colors.”
“It’s fine to have your child pick out the colors but you really have to guide him,” says Titus. “Take him to the paint store and have him pick out three colors and as time goes on, slowly help him narrow down the colors to one.”
Nicole Jones is a MetroKids intern and communications student at Drexel University.
