Five ways to change a kid's room without repainting

The room was decorated for a baby. The kid living in it now has opinions.

So here are five ways to change the room without opening a tin. They work on their own, so do one of them or do all five. If you are doing more than one, they are listed in the order we would tackle them.

1Panel the wall

A blank wall can make the whole room feel unfinished, even when you have sorted everything else. What fixes it is usually not more colour. It is breaking the wall up so it is not one big empty surface.

Half wall panels do exactly that. They put a horizontal break across the room at kid height, which gives the eye somewhere to land, and the colour goes on the lower half, which is the half that takes the wear anyway. If you only do one thing on this list, this is the one that changes the room the most.

On choosing the colour, our advice is to take it from something already in the room rather than from the wall. The rug, the doona cover, the one toy that never gets put away. A colour that picks up something already in there looks like a decision, and it saves you matching to a wall colour you may not keep. More on working out a palette in the colour edit.

Panels are sold per panel, so measure the width of the wall and divide by the panel width, and check against a sample in the room first. Most rooms land between six and nine.

If you are choosing between two of ours: Striped Scalloped Border Panels finish in a scallop rather than a straight line, which suits a room that is otherwise fairly plain. Scalloped Block Wall Panels do the same shape in one flat colour, which is the easier one to live with when there is already a lot going on in the room. Browse the full wall panels collection for every colourway.

2Give one wall a theme, and only one

This is where the kid gets a say. A dinosaur crew, a safari, a whale and its friends, a garden. Something that makes the room feel like theirs, not just nicely decorated.

Pick the wall they see from the bed, and leave the others quiet. A theme on every wall stops being a theme and starts being a lot. If the room is small, the wall opposite the door does the same job, because it is the one you see from the hallway.

Putting a themed set up is where most of the styling happens, and the temptation is to line everything up. Resist it. Work in odd numbers, start from something the eye already goes to, the bed head or the window, and let the spacing drift as you move away from it. Keep it loosest where the furniture is tallest, because a dinosaur behind a wardrobe is a dinosaur nobody sees. A wall that looks accidental takes a bit of arranging.

Where parents get stuck is the fear of committing to a craze that will not last the year, and it is a fair worry. It is also the one thing this format solves. A removable dinosaur wall is a very different decision from a dinosaur wall you painted.

Four of our most bought themes, if you want a starting point: Dino Dudes, Playful Safari Animals, Whale and Friends, and Floral Garden.

3Put a border around the door

This is the bit most people forget, and it can make the whole room feel finished. A scalloped border around the door frame, or along the skirting, or down the front of a wardrobe.

It works because a door frame is already a line. Adding colour to a shape the room already has looks deliberate, where the same colour in the middle of a blank wall looks like it landed there. It is also one of the quickest ways to pull a room together when the walls are staying exactly as the landlord left them.

Two things we would do. Match the border to the panels rather than the bedding, so the room has one thread running through it instead of three. And take it all the way to the floor rather than stopping at the skirting, unless the skirting is already part of the colour story.

4Do something about the storage

Stand in the doorway and look at what you can actually see. In a lot of kids' rooms, a good share of it is storage, and storage tends to be the bit everyone forgets about.

A few decals can change a surprisingly big chunk of the room, without replacing storage that is doing its job perfectly well. We make tub decals for the IKEA Trofast and the Kmart version of it, plus tops for the unit, so the thing holding all the toys stops being the loudest object in the room.

If you are doing this and the wall on the same side, keep them in the same colour family rather than matching them exactly. Close, but not identical, gives the room a bit more depth, and it is far more forgiving when you add the next thing.

5Put their name on something

A name above the bed, and a print or two hung at their height rather than yours.

Their name above the bed does something the rest of the room can't. It makes it very clearly theirs.

Prints are the quieter half of this. If the themed wall is doing a lot, two prints on the opposite wall settle the room back down, and they're easy to keep as the room changes.

If you are doing anything else on this list as well, leave this one until the end. It is far easier to place once the wall behind it is done.

The part nobody tells you

Doing more than one of these? Work big to small. Panels first, theme second, name last, so you are not fitting the big thing around the small thing.

Hang lower than feels right. Prints and name decals end up at adult eye height out of habit. Drop them. It is their eye line that matters.

Try before the whole wall. A sample on the actual wall, in the actual light, answers the colour question that a screen cannot.

Coming off. Start at a corner and pull back on yourself, slow and low to the wall rather than straight out.

None of this needs a drop sheet. That is most of the point.

Common questions