A room makeover for a unicorn-loving 4-year-old
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Our oldest daughter is all girl. She loves pink, hair bows, rainbows, dresses, nail polish, all of it! I had a blast putting together her nursery when I was pregnant (we didn’t find out the gender of either of our daughters… gender neutral nurseries for the win!):
When we moved into our last house, I had the opportunity to design a room more specific to her interests:
And now that she’s getting a little older and is able to tell us her likes and dislikes, and since we’ve moved yet again, I had so many ideas for her new room - but where to start?
We started off with a dark blue/grey room. The picture below is from the house listing and as you can see it’s certainly not the room a little girl dreams of.
I thought of doing an accent wall with a stencil, or maybe with wallpaper. I considered painting the ceiling a bold color and leaving the walls white - like this, or painting the ceiling a softer tone - like this. I even considered decals (this one here was especially tempting). Then I got lost on Pinterest looking at ombre walls and I fell in love.
Now that I had my general design idea, I needed to figure out a color scheme. While she’s getting more opinionated, when I asked my daughter what color she wanted her room to be she promptly told me every single color she could think of. So I had to scratch that idea.
I knew I wanted to steer away from all pink since that was the color of her room at our old house, but I still wanted something bright to keep it fun. I’ve always loved coral and teal together so after mulling it over I landed on that combination. I decided to paint the whole room in teal and use the coral as a transition color for the ombre wall. (Don’t worry, I’ll write a post about painting an ombre wall soon enough.)
Once her walls were complete, I could move on to decorating and pulling the whole room together.
I knew I wanted the ombre wall to be the focal point and would therefore be the wall her bed was on. We saw the canopy over her bed at Target before Christmas and she got so excited we thought she was going to burst into kittens, so we picked it up as a Christmas gift. It’s also ombre, (hard to tell in photos, but the bottom is pink and it transitions to white) so that may have played into the overall design a bit! The nightstands were a second-hand find on Facebook Marketplace and were conveniently already painted pink and white.
Although I’m very hesitant to hang anything on the ombre wall (I don’t see patching holes going very smoothly), I think it needs something more, so I’ll likely hang some pictures on either side of her bed once I get the confidence to drill into the wall.
For Christmas this year we were definitely less focused on buying toys that she’d get bored with in 5 minutes and more focused on buying things she’d enjoy for longer, so I picked up this unicorn lamp, this unicorn laundry hamper, and some unicorn hooks (I can’t find the original link, but these are similar) knowing that I would incorporate them into her new room. Above her dresser is a painting that I made several years ago that I think goes well with the color scheme. Surrounding the painting are some fan decorations that I bought for a friend’s bachelorette party a few years ago. I’m glad I kept them, because now they get a second life living on my daughter’s wall! I just opened them all the way and attached one side of the fan to the other with a Command strip, then used another Command strip to stick them to the wall. They’re lightweight and so far they seem to be staying up pretty securely.
On the wall with her window is an (admittedly undersized) shelf with a couple of her more breakable items, like this unicorn globe and her owl piggy bank. I plan to either get a larger shelf or balance out the wall with pictures on either side. Also, we need to replace the blinds in her window, so I didn’t bother to hang the old ones up.
In the meantime, she can enjoy the rainbows that the prisms I hung in her windows cast all over her room whenever the sun shines in.
I was also PUMPED to find that pink lamp in the corner at a thrift store for $30!! I was eyeballing this guy at Target for quite a while, but I tend to put things in my online cart and let them sit there for months before I click the “checkout” button. What can I say? I have commitment issues.
I usually shy away from buying lamps at thrift stores - the potential fire hazard scares me and having them rewired is kind of an inconvenience. But this one was listed as new and even had the plastic on the lampshade and styrofoam bits stuck to it. It’s not the same one from Target, but you really can’t tell unless you put them side-by-side. And it was $50 cheaper!
This room is definitely still a work in progress, but I have big plans to round it out.
I mentioned previously all the pictures I need to hang and the fact that I need to replace the blinds. I also have some work to do on the closet doors. If you’ll notice below, two of them are missing. We have the doors in the spare bedroom, but after the flooring was replaced by the previous homeowners, the doors get caught on the floor in the middle of the door frame and won’t slide. We’re not quite sure how to fix that yet. I’m thinking we’ll need to cut a sliver off the bottom of each of them. Aside from that little hiccup, painting the trim bright white has made it glaringly obvious how dull the closet doors are, so those will be getting a fresh coat of paint before long.
Another thing to tackle is painting the dresser (again). I bought this dresser and the tall counterpart (currently living in the master bedroom) at a thrift store years ago and refinished them. The color I chose conveniently worked for a long time, and it’s not terrible in this room either, but I think a crisp white would be better. Plus, I’m itching to change the drawer pulls out for something fun and quirky.
Lastly, this room is screaming for an area rug, and I’m ready to deliver. Honestly, if I could spend a couple of hours a day shopping for area rugs I’d be so happy. I’ve been pining over oriental rugs for years but I’m having a hard time convincing Lucius that they can look great. I think our daughter’s room would be a great place to start incorporating them, and I have my eye on several:
So, obviously there’s still lots to do here but I’ll keep chipping away and one day it’ll be complete… just in time for us to move again for me to update her room for the next stage of her life. We’ll see!
