DECORATING SMALL BEDROOMS FOR SIBLINGS
Tips and ideas for multi-age siblings sharing bedroom
Small bedrooms can be a challenge to decorate, but decorating small bedrooms for siblings can be difficult for even the best home decorator. Not only do you want a fun room where the children can play and sleep, you also want the room to be safe and organized.
When decorating small bedrooms for siblings, a major challenge is finding space for everything. This may necessitate building up instead of spreading out.
This is especially true if you have a nine-year-old sharing a room with a toddler. Little boy toys sometimes have small parts and pieces that can be extremely dangerous to infants and toddlers. Therefore, the challenge is to keep those small bits and pieces away from the infant, yet leave them accessible to the older child.
Make it Safe and Organized
There are a couple of ways to take care of the dangerous toy parts problem when designing or decorating a small room for siblings.
- Instead of having two separate beds next to each other, it might be better to use bunk beds. Build cubbies or shelves above the top bunk, where the older child can store his small toys.
- If you want the siblings have opposite sides of the room, a loft over a single or twin bed on one side of the room is a good way to save space. In the instance of an older and younger siblings sharing the space, the loft area or indoor tree house for the older child, can become an railed play area, perfect for Lego's, Lincoln logs and building a race track. Not only that, but it becomes a place where the older child can get away from a pestering younger sibling.
- Another idea is to use a gate to divide the room. Some gates you can be set up in the round. For those you don't need a wall nearby.
- And at last you can remove all toys with choking-hazard pieces from the shared room and keep them in the living room in a storage box.
Privacy is important
When decorating small bedrooms with multiple people in them, space is the biggest issue. With siblings sharing bedroom, one way to make both of them happy is to split the room in half.
- Instead of a curtain, why not install a screen of lattice panels between the two beds. Hooks hanging from the lattice partition will provide a place to hang bags of small toys out of the reach of the youngest sibling.
- Another way to divide the room is to install a set of lockers, down the center of the room, where they would do double duty as a privacy provider and a safe lockable place for dangerous toys.
Any of these divider suggestions will give each child their privacy and provide additional safe storage.
How to make a small bedroom look bigger
There are also tricks you can use to make a small bedroom look bigger.
- For example, decorating in light colors and avoiding darker colored curtains can help open up a small room.
- Windows that let in a lot of natural light as well as good artificial lights also make small rooms look bigger.
- If you can add a mirror to the room opposite to where the natural light is entering, this will increase the light in the room and make it look even bigger.
Decorating small bedrooms for siblings can be a daunting task, especially when the two are such different ages. You want to allow the older child to enjoy his room and toys, and yet you want to keep the toddler safe.
However, with a little thinking outside of the box, planning and compromise, you will find that the room looks great, and the kids are safe and happy.
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