How to Design a Boy’s and Girl’s Room

It’s almost too easy to decorate a nursery today. Either it’s blue or it’s pink. Either you have little blue lambs or little pink hearts and flowers. And it’s all so boring. In two or three years, you can guarantee you’re going to hear, “I want a big boy (or big girl) room now.”

Considering how much money you put into the original nursery with it’s expensive crib, crib sheets that Dolce and Cabana wouldn’t charge that much for, and all the cutesy pie little accessories that are only cute until they’re about two, that’s going to be quite a makeover.

What if you designed it right the first time and made it easier to grow the room with your child? Take one accessory our here, add one there and make the room perfect.

Start with the color. How many of you have pastel pink or baby blue walls. Yellow can be nice as long as it’s not a pale, limpwristed yellow. How about a lemonade. Stripes can be terrific. Two shades of blue stripes with a hint of red thrown in every few feet down the wall. If dad or mom is a super sports fan, you can base the theme on your favorite team. That doesn’t mean that a Steelers bedroom needs to have black walls with gold accents. But what if the walls were pale green with black and gold Steeler Bumper Pads, Steeler Sheets, a Steeler lamp, a Steeler rug and a Steeler pad on the glider or rocking chair. Along with a white crib and changing table, the whole room might come together quite nicely. The colors green, black, gold and white all go together and think of what how dad and his son could bond. As you and your son get older, perhaps a video game or TV set could be introduced so father and son could enjoy games together.

A little girl who’s mom is crazy about scrap booking, could cover the nursery walls with lavender and hang lavender scrap booking pages at odd angles on the wall. The pages could be filled with everything you’d put in your daughter’s book and as you fill them up, they could be taken down and replaced with new ones, while the old ones actually went into the book sitting on top of the dresser. A table with a beveled edge glass top, can hold cut outs to be included in the scrapbook. Scrapbook supplies could be hung out of reach from tiny fingers – on long dangly ribbons e.g. scissors, glue, packages of rivets. A straw hat on the wall could be decorated with ribbons and a working clock face. The comforter could be a photo transfer of baby pictures. As your daughter grown, the scrapbook supplies could be brought into reach and you and your daughter could sit around the table to work on scrapbooks together.

No matter what your family passion: tennis, fishing, hiking, biking, baseball, cooking, you can always find a way to introduce your passion to that of your child. If you think that can’ happen, you should hear my two-and-a-half year old grandson Max every time he sees a Steeler’s license place, “Ere we go Steelers, ere we go” Okay so the “H” in “here” is still silent but Max makes up for it by yelling at the top of his lung and while my demure Southern California daughter-in-law rolls her eyes, my son looks up and says, “It’s the proudest moment of my life.”