Children Room Decoration

Function and decoration should be combined. Pretty curtains can be fun for a child's room, but for rumbustious children who are tempted to swing from anything that hangs; roller blinds may be a better bet and won't need cleaning so often. They are also less likely to dislodge small collected items, which may be stored on the window sill. Decoration should not be thought of as something tacked onto the room as an afterthought, but should be part of its integral design. If a child is given a pleasant room from an early age, he or she will learn to think about the room, enjoy it and have definite ideas for decorating it later on, which should be listened to. These ideas may not fit in with your own opinions, but then it is not your room.

Painted walls are ideal because they can be re-painted when the child wants a change of color or pattern. Use water-based paints which do not smell too strongly and are quick-drying. Don't attempt to introduce nursery friezes and murals unless you are not bothered if they get scribbled over. If you really do mind, varnish the mural over with a protective polyurethane matt varnish. Professional murals can be expensive, with the result that they become 'untouchable', but parents may enjoy painting a wall with characters or scenes from a child's favorite book. The wall next to the child's bed would be best, perhaps, for this treatment, which can give the child something to focus on when going to sleep and waking up in the morning. An alternative to a mural is to stencil a simple motif (perhaps a star or animal, or a butterfly), onto the wall at regular intervals.

For children, walls are not simply surfaces for displaying pretty wallpapers or paint finishes, but a whole dimension with many decorative and practical uses. Whether you have a blackboard or not, they will use a wall to kick against, for bouncing balls off, and even for bouncing themselves off it, so the finish should be durable and easy to clean. You can provide a painting and pinning area by fixing hardboard onto the lower third of the wall. Nail a batten to the wall. Fix the top of the board to this and the bottom of the board to the skirting. Apply two or three coats of special blackboard paint over a base coat of emulsion to give a good surface for chalk. A strip of pegboard or a long, narrow pin board can run along one wall for pictures and letters. It is more fun for children if their pictures are pinned at eye-level, rather than higher up where only adults can enjoy them.