We moved in to this house last July. Since then my daughter has waited patiently for me to get moving on her bedroom design, which is pretty spectacular considering as soon as she found out that we were moving she immediately took to Pinterest to search for ideas and inspiration for her new bedroom. Like mother like daughter. 😉
I thought we were moving in the right direction with this bright, colorful leopard meets black and white thing we started with, as she told me she wanted bright colors in her room; but as it turns out she wasn’t really digging these colors or this bold pattern combination.
Since we hadn’t really done much but add in the bright colored quilt and shams (from HomeGoods) to use with the leo comforter she had in her old room I didn’t feel bad about scrapping the bedding all together and starting from scratch. (*Sidenote – I plan to sell this bedding, so if you’re interested in this full/queen size set email me at Carmel@ourfifthhouse.com.)
She says she wants more of an “Anthro vibe”…..I’m not even kidding…..my 9 almost 10 year old girl literally said that…..who is this kid?!  😉 She loves turquoise and aqua…..floral prints……stripes……..she wants girlie but not too princess-y….again, her words not mine. So this time rather than selecting bedding for her, I brought her out shopping with me. I typically like to start a bedroom design by choosing the bedding first, so I figured a girls shopping trip was a great place to start and would hopefully help me to better understand the look she’s after. She immediately fell head over heels in love with this striped floral print quilt, and the room design plans just flowed from there.
(lilac, aqua, turquoise velvet pillows – floral quilt)
It’s colorful but in a much less in your face kind of way and it definitely has more of a vintage vibe as opposed to the previous bedding mix. Once the quilt was selected I asked her to choose two main colors from the colors in the quilt to use as the main players. She chose turquoise and aqua, and the plum/lavender and coral will play supporting roles. So the plan is to paint the walls a light grey almost white (Shoji White by Sherwin Williams) and then, and I know this is going to upset some people, but I’ll be painting the furniture. The dresser and nightstand are going to go aqua and the bed might get painted white. It’s a possibility that I’ll leave the bed as is……that’s to be determined as things start to fall into place. I’m a really visual person so I typically need to see how the elements are working together before making all of the design decisions.
I found this turquoise rug at Lowe’s. I love this fun punch of turquoise color. I’m going to bring in a small desk to create a vanity/study area along this wall here.
We’ve had this bedroom furniture for years. It belonged to her great grandmother but after all these years and all these many moves it has seen better days. There are chips and scratches all over the nightstand and dresser, and then there is the joy of a child leaving a cup of water on the nightstand overnight. Ugh. I think paint will really give these treasured pieces new life.
The Life is a Beautiful Ride print was a Target find, and I have plans to change it up a bit. My girl loves to ride her bike; so this fabric wrapped canvas sort of jumped out at me, and she loves it. The great thing about Target is that their return policy is so great, so you can easily grab things to bring them home and “audition” them, as I like to say, to see if they’ll work in your space. As you can see from the above photo I hadn’t even taken the tags off of this lamp when I shot these photos as I was playing with a couple of different lamp options, but this white reading lamp is the one that made the cut.
The lamps on the dresser were borrowed from the guest room. Musical lamps is a fun game to play, but now the guest room needs lamps. #itsalwayssomething
The window will be outfitted with curtain panels…..haven’t narrowed down the options just yet.
So far not one item we’ve chosen for her room has come from “the kids department”, yet the whole space already has a youthful vibe. And with paint and accessories more of that youthfulness will come through. You really don’t have to shop in the kids department to decorate a kids room. If you venture outside of that department you’ll find a lot more options that will have better staying power over time, plus you’ll end up with things that could easily work in other spaces in your home whenever you do want to make changes. Like this rug for instance could easily work in a living room or office.
So that’s where we stand with the girl’s room design, and this time everyone is enthusiastically on board!
While I’d like to namast’ay in bed (sorry couldn’t resist) this weekend, I’ll be up and at ’em early Saturday morning with a paint roller in hand.
aaah that bedding is awesome!!!!!!