Creative Ways To Paint Your Child's Room

When I was a child I finally got my own room. Not an easy trick with 3 sisters and a brother all competing for the same thing. My father was in a painting mood, so he let us pick the colors for our rooms. But somehow when I told my father I wanted an orange room with brown trim, he thought I wanted a brown room with orange trim. I didn't find out the misunderstanding until we got home with the paint. Then we had to make another trip to the store for more orange paint.

We went with a nice semi-gloss for easier clean-up.

Paints have changed a lot since then with so many more options available.

Some paint companies now feature interactive websites where you can try out all your color schemes without leaving your house. I love the site at Behr paint. http://www.behr.com/behrx/workbook/ You can register for free and play with their workbook and save your ideas to show someone later.

I also love their Venetian plaster technique shown here: http://www.behr.com/behrx/expert/activity.jsp?catId=600&aid=616&subnav=interior&project=null&look=null&area=null&from=search

I tried it out with my 2 adult children and we all loved the way it turned out. It's very posh looking.

There are many places to get inspirations for a room. I saw a fabulous Pirates of the Caribbean themed room on television and another one that was a stateroom made to look like the elegance of the Titanic. Talk with your children and find out what they are excited about. Use those ideas as a launch pad for your theme.

In a pirate room, instead of a toy box, have a treasure chest. Make use of stencils to add interest to walls. You could paint the bottom of each wall a midnight blue to suggest the ocean, tapering up to a lighter blue, and finally stencil or rag paint some clouds in the sky.

Stencil a pirate ship sailing on the high seas. If you get a four poster bed, each post can fly a jolly roger flag.

Or you could have a King Arthur or Lord of the Rings themed bedroom. Design heraldic banners to paint on the walls. Or make them out of fabric and hang them from the curtain rods. Put the kids to work doing research for the room and you'll get a history lesson in the process.

Paint the walls to look like castle bricks. Base coat the walls an off white. Then cut a rectangular stencil the size and shape of the bricks you want. Don't make them too tiny or you'll be there all day.

Then dip a rag in various shades of gray, brown and white and use your stencils to make each brick. Keep them in line by using drafting tape horizontally around the walls. Make sure to paint some 'faux' windows or you might feel like you are in a jailhouse.

Another popular theme is outer space. You can either do a cartoon version with happy little aliens painted zooming around in spaceships or a more serious look with planets and comets and the milky way. Hang colored Chinese lanterns to look like floating planets. Use star stencils or those glow in the dark stick on stars they sell in toy-stores and science gift-shops. Make a mobile of the universe to hang from the ceiling. If you child makes spaceship or Star Trek or Star Wars models, you can hang those as well.

You can also make a faery land bedroom. In my room I have fishing line strategically placed so that when you open the bedroom door, a faery comes floating down from the ceiling. If you are a good artist you can paint a faery mural. Or if you are like most people, go with stencils. Remember, you can make original stencils with paper, cardboard or stiff plastic sheets.

Put a floaty white canopy over the bed made out of mosquito netting and put a black light somewhere to give the room a magical glow.