I’ve been watching lots of home design shows, and so often the kid’s room is themed around the kid’s interests (for instance, a dinosaur mural on the wall, or a bed that looks like a racecar). Did your parents take your tastes into account when decorating your room?
It wasn’t a thing that would have occurred in my family, but I was very envious of a girl I knew when I was a teenager. Her parents let her paint her room black and cover every inch of the walls and ceiling with pages cut from Circus magazine. It was killer!
When I was 7 or so, my mother designed my bedroom with matching trundle bed, desk, dressers, hutches, etc. It was literally right out of the Sears catalogue. The colors were pink and green and I had wallpaper with giant butterflies. It really was nice; she was trying to give me a bedroom that she could never have dreamed of having. Unfortunately I eventually outgrew it and by the time I was 12, I was embarrassed to have anyone see it.
No. I shared with 2 sisters. Ain’t no agreeing on room decorations until one moves up or out. I remember highly desiring a canopy bed and a Princess telephone. Never did get my own room until recently.
Like, a custom build? No. But my bedroom was what had been the master bedroom before a big remodel in the 80’s, and the original builder had designed the bedroom with a built-in dresser, a built-in cupboards (all flush with the wall, so nothing but the handles stuck out), built-in drawers under one end of the closet, and a built-in foot locker - like storage compartment under the other end of the closet. It was nothing special as a kid but now as an adult I really wish I had similar storage in my current home.
Decorating and whatnot was left to me. However had I wanted something garish or unique on the walls my parents would’ve immediately vetoed it. We could put up posters and art and the like, but nothing more radical than that. Nothing that would require repainting.
I mean, I did get input- I got to pick the paint color when we repainted it (a strange light teal that I liked when I was 12). But for the most part, it wasn’t “decorated”.
My dad, a fairly skilled amateur artist, actually reproduced a “Star Wars” scene on my wall as a small-ish mural about 5-6 feet across and about 4 feet high.
This is pretty close to the mural (I think Dad used a lunch box or book cover or something like that):
Nah. We had 2 9’x9’ bedrooms. One was yellow with a yellow & green wallpaper wall and the other was blue. I think my brother and I swapped rooms a couple times over the years but the one stayed blue and the other stayed yellow.
I do remember that in my older brother’s room there was a taped-on mural of a rainbow with some clouds. But since dad smoked inside it didn’t stay up too long (it got smoke-yellowed). We also had a pillowcase with a rainbow on it. I think that’s why I have an affinity for anything rainbow now.
My mom and I always hoot and holler at the TV when home reno shows do elaborate little kids rooms. Especially that Extreme Home Makeover show when they do stuff like make a basketball court for an 8-year-old who likes basketball or a custom dinosaur bed for a 4-year-old who thinks dinos are neat. That’s sooooooo crazy!
I remember when my mom let me move from my childhood bedroom into my bigger “adult” room across the hall - I was around 13. It had a full-sized bed and she let me pick the decorations, so I went with cheetah-themed, and it stayed that way until I left for college. I was too obliviously tacky to be embarrassed by it. But it was just the comforter, curtains, phone, etc. Nothing major built in like some of those shows.
I had no decorations or any other customization of my choosing.
What decorations I had were things my parents always had but didn’t need anywhere else in the place, and didn’t seem grossly out of place in a boy’s bedroom. Simply as an alternative to putting away or disposing of them.
No, no theme, but when the books started piling up, my mom and I built some built-in bookcases to hold them all. That certainly made it feel like my room.
Nope. My dad finished the upstairs in our bungalow to make 2 bedrooms - one for my 3 sisters, and the other for me. Both had linoleum floors w/ a carpet remnant, and cheap wall paneling. Regular twin bed. Desk was a door bolted onto a chest of drawers. Lamps and such were whatever was no longer used in the downstairs rest of the house.
I used to collect pennants and at one point I thumbtacked them up to the trim where the walls met the sloping ceiling. That was about it for decoration.
As an infant my father, who has always liked penguins, painted Opus flying in a hot air baloon against a cloud backdrop on the walls of the closet I lived in. We moved out when I was one, but I got to visit the house in my teens. The walls had been covered up but the roof still showed his clouds.
As a child my brother and I shared a room. We were both into Thomas the Tank Engine and one day a family friend teamed up with the parents to paint Thomas and James on our wall.
We had free reign over what posters or drawings to hang up. For many years the far end of the room was a secret laboratory on account of the hand-drawn fingerprint scanner taped to the wall segment. Later the laboratory was replaced with a television set (which we did not choose, but placed), a desk (which we chose from a yard sale, I think), and a shelf for all the participation trophies.
My parents are pretty conservative in the home decor department. My room (like pretty much every room in the house before the big remodel circa 1990) had plain off-white walls and yellow shag carpeting, and fairly plain furniture. When my parents eventually replaced the carpet I didn’t have any say; they just went with the same color in all the bedrooms. Pretty much the extent of the customization I got to do was putting my own posters on the walls.
My bedroom in my childhood home was 49ers themed. One side of the room was painted red, the other side had white wallpaper with red, gold, and black pinstripes. All the way around, at the top of the walls, was a wallpaper border with 49ers helmets.
We lived in that house for about 10 years, from when I was around 4-14 years old. I became a 49ers fan at 6, I don’t remember exactly how long after that we redecorated.
When my wife was pregnant, I started a Mickey Mouse themed strip decorating the to-be nursery. A red stripe with black moulding lining the top and yellow moulding along the bottom, and a bunch of big white buttons. Only the red stripe got done, but it looked good. My son’s room in our current house is undecorated* but I’m willing of he wants something.
*: the floor is decorated with an ever-changing mosaic of plastic and wood and the occasional stale goldfish.
