Decorated? What’s that?
Sure, the place had shag carpet when we moved in, and they bought a bed and curtains. The dresser and desk were from family.
But decorated? What’s that?
My mom learned how to turn sheets into curtains, so my room in the new house had curtains made from sheets featuring Peanuts characters. My room also had an “AUTORHIZED PERSONNEL ONLY” sign outside the door, which came with the house. Everything else was pretty standard fare.
Painting, or murals? No, we didn’t have the money or the talent. But everything else, sure.
I had Budweiser sheets (from Sears). I had shelves and tables for my models, I had a 4x8 slot car table with a bench for us all to sit at while we raced. I had a whole room dedicated to my farm toys. We even experimented with making an indoor sandbox at one point. (It didn’t work).
We had a huge house. I had five different bedrooms over the years. My folks and I would rotate. (I had no siblings at home.)
One of my daughters-in-law is totally into the themed bedrooms. She did her daughter’s room in Harry Potter mode, complete with a dresser that looks like piled up suitcases, special wall hangings, etc. She does this for both her kids every few years. She’s very good at it, but I can’t see spending that kind of money on a fleeting fad. But then their basement is a tribute to Star Wars, Avengers, LOTR, and other things of that ilk. They’ve spent a fortune on plastic.
Yeah, that was my reaction. I remember once, though, when my mom was buying curtains for the bedrooms she let me pick out the fabric for mine. I didn’t have my own bedroom until I was eleven when we moved to a bigger house, so it must have been then.
We didn’t do designed rooms either.
In our household, it was pretty well understood that everything belonged to the parents, and “my” room was the place where I would be allowed to sleep and keep my things…for a time.
I shared a room with my brother until I was eleven, so I was delighted just to have some privacy.
When I was born, my room was mostly white with primary color highlights. My parents didn’t know if I would be a girl or a boy, so they decoration was neutral.
Sometime before I lost my first tooth, my mom changed the decoration to J. Manes Holly Hobbie Style Sunbonnet Girls Fabric. She made the bedspread, pillow shams, curtains, and even a toothfairy pillow, which I still have.
When I was 11 or 12, I went to camp for a week. I came home and my room was decorated in goldenrod. This is the closest I could find. That stayed like that until I moved out.
My sister (15 months younger) and I shared a roughly 9’X9’ bedroom for about 17 years. Theme? HAH! There were 2 beds and a desk, so I guess the theme was sleep and do homework, even tho we mostly did homework at the dining room table.
I think the room was painted pink. We had bedspreads and curtains, but I couldn’t tell you what they looked like. Then again, it was a place to sleep and keep our clothes. I did have some travel posters on the wall for a time - that’s as close as I ever came to a theme.
My daughter never had theme bedrooms. She did have a Little Mermaid comforter at one point - does that count? She never seemed to care, beyond wanting to pick her wall color.
When I was about three, I had Holly Hobbie wallpaper in the apartment we lived in. I loved Holly Hobbie.
Later, when we lived in another place, I BEGGED to have my room painted pink. A year after that, my sister was born, and we’d have to share a room, so my dad, to make me feel better, said we could have canopy beds (which I had wanted since before I could remember)
So we had a pink room with canopy beds, and we were always allowed to put up pictures or whatever of stuff we liked.
Unfortunately, the next place we lived in, we had ceiling fans, so we couldn’t put the canopies back up. I DID have a poster of Patrick Swayze over my bed. 
Eventually we got separate rooms, so we were each able to choose our own decorations, and by then I was about 12 or 13, so most of mine was full of pictures and posters from Tiger Beat or whatever. We were both allowed to choose the color of our rooms, and our own comforters, curtains, etc.
I am an only child. I lived with my parents and, when she was in Canada, my grandmother (briefly my grandfather too, shortly before he died). In my family, the bedrooms were, as a rule, rather Spartan, done as practical sleeping rooms with little decoration of any kind. Until I was three, I slept in a crib in my parents’ room. Sometime before I was four, Iikely around the time I was 3 and a half, I was given my own room. I got used to it, but had preferred the prior arrangement. I don’t recall any decoration of any kind; it was a plain small room looking out to the balcony of the apartment we lived in. Then when I was turning 6, my parents bought a house. Again, I was allotted a room, and it was the smallest in the house looking out to the porch, which also made it probably the one getting the least sunlight. Again, I got used to it, but envied my parents’ and my grandparents’ (soon just my grandmother’s) room a bit. The house had some cheap light green and yellow paint from the 1950s and my parents were renovating everything. When time came to do my room done in a yellow that was chipping off, IIRC I wanted to choose a rainbow color again, but I was told that the room would be painted the same pinkish-toned white as the rest of the house. However, my parents did put wallpaper on one wall in my room, and I remember we went to the shop together and I was given a say in the design or at any rate shown the paper and I liked the ultimate choice of pattern: drawings of old-fashioned planes, cars and locomotives (as a kid, I was crazy about trains and planes). Other than that, I could put up any drawings, pictures, posters, etc. that I wanted, but I’m sure that if I had brought anything my parents thought in poor taste, they would have vetoed it.
Growing up, my parents sometimes spoke about buying a bigger house. I heard and read stories about kids whose parents let them paint their room any way they wanted or even to choose which room they wanted in the house. I envied those kids and hoped that in any eventual other house, I would be given the chance to. We ended up moving into that “better house” (in fact, a slightly newer bungalow with a garage and a finished basement) when I was almost 18. Here the story gets really disfunctional.
I lived at home through college (I attended the University of Toronto, and lived in Toronto - go figure). However, by this point, my life in that house was not cozy at all. The quote above was the reality during my studies - and ramped up to eleven. Before we moved into the house, I made a point of looking around the rooms and asking to be given one I liked, which just happened to be the largest in the house, though not by a wide margin (there were three bedrooms and two were fairly close in size, while the third one was crappy, cramped with a small high window). I was given the room I wanted, but my mother later berated me for not having asked for such a good room in a humble enough manner, and told me she could have put me in the basement if she wanted (I may have been a little resolute when asking for the first room; I was likely as eager to beat her to assigning me the crappy little room as I was to get the one I had chosen). In that house my mother, who by this time had developed into a self-centered, despotic narcissist, made all the decisions about furnishings and decoration (or lack therof) - her one concession to my father not to tear down a fireplace in the living room resulted in a crazily complex and ultimately unsuccessful re-decoration of that room on her part in order to accommodate said fireplace to her taste. As for me, though I got the room I had wanted, that was the last concession given me. My parents then made it clear that I had no authority over that room and that it was solely their house (an attempt on my part to assert some authority over my own room was very harshly crushed - story for another day). My room was even more Spartan than the one in the other house had been. I had my bed and the natural wood shelves and desk that my father had built for my old room, and very few things on those shelves. My mother came and went when she pleased, without knocking. As I recall, I was not allowed to keep most of my books there (these eventually ended up in the garage) because my tiger-mom mother claimed they would be a distraction from studying. The room came with vertical blinds that were serviceable; my mother didn’t like them, so she took them down without asking me for my opinion and replaced them with drapes that she liked that reminded her of her grandparents’ house in Serbia decades ago. These were white with a flower pattern; the neighbor’s porchlight shone through these at night when I was trying to sleep. I complained to my mother, mentioning both the light and that I didn’t really like the drapes. She more or less ignored the comment about the light and told me that I didn’t have good taste (she was that narcissistic). Then one day she went into my room in the evening, saw the problem with the porchlight and was shocked that I had that kind of sleep disruption. When I told her that I had already told her I needed different drapes, she shifted the blame to me, saying that I “should have clamored” about the problem.
Part of the issue here was that my mother was bitter that she couldn’t sleep with my father in the same room, because he is not calm at night. He coughs, tosses and turns in bed, and scratches himself. So by this time she was sleep in the living room. Once around the summer following my freshman year, she was having a bout of bitter arguments with my father over, well, issues. One day, she angrily announced that she was taking my room. That night, I had to sleep in what was nominally both my parents’ room, in the usually vacant bed beside my father’s. It was an awful night. My father was indeed tossing and turning, and at one point, he was doing something else for an extended period of time - I don’t know if he was jerking off or just scratching himself. Happily, the next day, she let me back into my room and proceeded to sleep, I assume, again in the living room (or the one in the basement).
Another time, about a year before I moved out, I brought home a letter-size color photocopy of a favorite Art Nouveau poster and asked to put it up on the wall in my by then-completely bare room. (Yes - I had to ask permission. I evidently had less control over my room as a young adult than I had as an eight-year-old). She refused to let me do so, saying that “I would have my nice little room while she had none” - in other words out of spite, due to her issue with sleeping with my father that was not any fault of mine.
Yet another way in which my mother displayed her narcissism.
When I moved into the big room at the end of the hallway, my mom let me pick out wallpaper. I helped to hang the wallpaper, too.
I let my kids pick stuff for their rooms, as well. My daughter picked the shade of pink paint, and my son… May have been too young, or may have helped pick the train paper across the top.
What a terrible story, themapleleaf! I hope you managed to get out of that house right after college.
My parents, dad especially, would often say semi-jokingly that everything in our home belonged to the adults and I had time to enjoy it until I turned 18, but their actions really didn’t bear that up, because I had a lot of say in the room decorations.
I remember being around 10 and going to the carpet store to choose carpets for both mine and my parents’ room. My mum wanted to get neutral beige carpets for both rooms, but I really loved a certain dainty design with mint green leaves and pink roses. She hated the idea, but dad convinced her that I should have the choice for my own room. I loved that carpet for as long as it lasted.
Another story is of the time I actually got my room decorated for me and it didn’t go so great. As a teenager I chose a wallpaper with an embossed design of realistic rocks. My parents spent an entire day putting it up for me. I don’t know why I wasn’t helping, maybe someone had got annoyed and told me to get out of the way. It required a lot of effort to match the pattern too. I didn’t get to see the results until the whole room was ready. Long story short, they put it up upside down. All the rocks cast their shadows upwards, and it was quite an intense psychedelic effect with all the walls of the small room looking like that. It was too late to change anything at that point and I lived like that for many years.
It got even worse after we adopted a cat - the paper was meaty enough to really sink one’s claws into, and the kitten was a climber, so she would often get all the way to the ceiling before she fell off. She never scratched any other walls.
That is an adorable and hilarious mental image, and now I kinda want textured wallpaper and a rock-climbing kitten to destroy it!
My parents built our house in 1961-2. I was about a year old when we moved in. So obviously I had no say in my bedroom decor. My mom painted it lavender. When I was out of a crib, my furniture was handed down from my grandparents. I don’t remember if there was anything on the walls. Around the age of 5, I had posters of the Beatles on my wall. That started my poster craze. A few years later, my walls were covered in posters - the Monkees, David Cassidy, the Osmonds, just about anyone that was in a Tiger Beat magazine was on my walls. There were horse figurines on my dresser. When it was time for repainting, I was able to pick out the new color - light blue.
I was pretty much able to decorate however I wanted. Although my dad absolutely HATED all of the nail and thumbtack holes in the walls.
We moved house a few times, but no, none of them were. My first bedroom was shared with my older brother- I don’t really remember what that looked like, except for the bunkbed, It was too small to fit two separate beds in, and neither of us spent much time in there.
The next two places were rentals, and we were only there temporarily.
The final childhood place was bought- I again got the tiny box room, but it wasn’t redecorated at all until I moved out. It had white walls, plain except for the plentiful scratch marks left by the previous residents, a bed, small chest of drawers, and a fishtank (which was a birthday present). There wasn’t enough space for a chair, and I used a cupboard in the corridor as a wardrobe. I didn’t get to pick the bedding, it was a neutral brownish floral set.
For 2 years after my brother moved out, I did get to switch to the bigger bedroom, in which I did put up a few posters and photos in my teens -and got a chair, as a Christmas present.
My mother flatly refused to let me redecorate- at least unless I paid for it, which I obviously couldn’t afford at 11- on the grounds that she’d picked her childhood wallpaper as a 6 year old and hated it by the time she moved out.
I get the reluctance to waste money, but I do somewhat resent living in a room with plain white scratched-up wallpaper for 6 years being framed as doing me a favour… I also have to say, even at 10, I don’t think I would have chosen anything as over-the-top as the paper she picked for that room when I moved out. Think brightly coloured relief animal print…
I chose for my childhood room to have a dark blue painted ceiling and matching carpet. The walls were yellow with little daubs and sprays of various-colored paint across them. The painter said it was the most fun he’d ever had on a job. The next room (we moved a lot) had half of the floor carpeted and half tile. The ceiling had little glow-in-the-dark star stickers. I have a fuzzy memory of the reason being “so I could breakdance” which for a suburban white kid was pretty funny, white glove or no.
I forgot about those! I did put those up in the bedroom of the house we moved to when I was 5, and they remained there until we redecorated when I was 13. (Not sure exactly how long it was after we moved that I put them up, but probably a few years.) Those were neat.
I know many families don’t have the financial resources to give every kid their own room, much less the Laura Ashley room of their choice. But it makes me sad to read about those parents who wouldn’t even let their kids decorate in their own way, on their own dime. Kids get to control so few aspects of their own lives. Why can’t parents ease up on the little things?
When I was ten or so, I asked for my room to be redecorated. It started out pink and white and was very little girl-ish. I got to pick out my wallpaper, a blue, brown, and white floral print, and my mother bought a dresser, desk, bookshelf, and cupboard for me, which she stained reddish-brown. I also got a light blue rug. I loved it. To me, it was the height of sophistication. I still have and use all of the furniture except the desk.
No, my room as a child was a very small room that I shared with my older brother. It was about 7 ft by 9 feet and had stacked army surplus bunk beds along one side with a table on the opposite wall. There was about 2 feet of passageway down the middle.
Even worse, as a teenager, my room was an alcove created by the hall coming from the bathroom and turning the corner into a family room. I hated that - teenage boys do need privacy.
We were pretty poor. But not as bad as a friend who actually lived in an old chicken house on the side of his parents house.
So I see the current trends as making a lot of kids very fortunate.
I didn’t have my own room, my younger sister and I shared the room and a full-size bed. But we had a blast. We’d sing songs, play games and laugh until our dad told us to be quiet and go to sleep. I wouldn’t change that part of my childhood for anything.
My best friend’s bedroom looked like a hotel room. Not one bit of kid’s stuff was in that room. She had two pictures of flowers above her bed, the dresser had two lamps, a doily and maybe a jewelry box on it. That was it. It looked like a guest room. And it was as neat as a pin. Her mom wouldn’t allow anything. She was the same mom that would stick her head in the room when we were giggling and laughing and say, “girls that’s too much giggling, it’s getting loud”. There was nothing to play with in her room so we’d just sit on the bed (I’m surprised we were allowed to do that) and talk. If we wanted to play we had to go to the basement where we’d set up a card table and play a game. There were no other toys.