Designing Your Child’s Room
When you are deciding how to design and decorate your child’s room, both short-term as well as long-term considerations need to be kept in mind. The room will need to be able to evolve and be easily changed as your child grows up and his or her own needs and tastes change as well.
A child’s room will be more than simply a place to sleep and change clothes. It will be the hub of their lives as they grow older, their place to study, play, pursue hobbies, and entertain their friends. Whatever the design for the room, it needs to be flexible enough to meet all these needs as the child moves from toddler to tween to teen.
To help you as your child’s room takes shape, we’ve offered the following suggestions:
- Be sure to include your child in the design process for his or her room. The room should reflect their own personal style and color choices. There should be limits established, but your child should have some say in how their special place will take shape.
- Any furnishings or floor coverings need to be decorative, practical, and fitting for the child as he or she grows older. Selecting basic items with these requirements in mind will enable the room to be modified from a young child’s to a teenager’s with a minimum of additional expense.
- The floor covering itself tends to be a major investment in a child’s room. Because the room will see so much traffic, it’s important that the floor covering, be it area rugs or wall-to-wall carpet, is durable and easy to maintain.
- Painting the walls offers a relatively easy way to change the look and feel of the room as the child grows older and his or her tastes change. However, while it is important to respect a child’s color wishes, keep in mind that some color choices are harder to paint over than others.
To enable easier color transitions, be sure to steer away from extreme color choices like all black or very dark reds. It might be a good idea to have your child select many different color options and then help them narrow the field down to those that will provide the most flexibility for future repainting.
- Your child may wish to decorate his or her room using a specific theme that is age-related and likely to eventually fall out of favor as your child grows older. To fulfill this room preference while also allowing for an easy redecoration when the time comes, limit any such themes to only one of the bedroom’s walls. This will cost less now and require less investment later when the child wants to give his or her room a fresh look.
