Giving your kids’ room a makeover is a great excuse to splash out on colour and display, but when you have two children sharing the same small space, you have to consider the needs and tastes of both.
WATCH: Tara Dennis transforms a girls’ bedroom into a boho paradise
Storage solutions and functionality are crucial, and fairness is key, but the fun factor will top the list for your littlies. So focus on pops of colour and cool play areas – your kids will love it!
These five fun and functional decorating ideas that bring back creativity and banish boredom, ‘go to your room’ will no longer be considered words of warning.
1. Room for activities
Let their imaginations run wild by building a play station at the end of their bed – and we don’t mean the digital kind. A three-cube storage unit is the perfect base to make this clever piece, framed in pre-cut 16mm MDF then glued and screwed together.
Round the corners to make it kid-friendly, then apply a water-based primer. Paint the outside in a hardwearing topcoat colour to match your bed frame and the inside in chalkboard paint. An extra insert piece of MDF, primed, painted and covered in faux turf or an offcut of vinyl flooring, makes an ideal changeable floor for each play station.
2. Favourite colours
Come bedtime, provide your kids with the cutest and most colourful spot to slumber. Paint solid timber bed frames – here, vintage finds – in a colour to suit your scheme. Sand, apply water-based primer, then finish with a hardwearing water-based topcoat in white and a highlight colour-pop.
To ensure the kids’ room always looks considered, mix and match bedding and accessories to a complementary colourway – try blues and greens or pinks and peachy tones.
3. Playful storage
Armed with a roll of masking tape and a selection of coloured chalkboard paints, you can transform a plain, pre-primed chest of drawers into a colourful work of art.
Puzzles, dolls, cars and crafts, or undies, socks and pyjamas – once your child has decided what goes where, use dust-free chalk to write up the contents of each drawer.
4. Chalkboard toy chest
If your kids adore to draw (especially on the walls), ensure their creativity knows no bounds by painting a large vertical surface in chalkboard paint.
Here, boring wardrobe doors have been transformed into an artist’s canvas by masking up sections, then priming and painting in various colours.
For side-by-side bands of colour, paint one section, leave to dry, then re-mask and paint the next section, and so on.