As I’ve mentioned a time or two, my oldest daughter turned 13 this year. She has been asking for a Harry Potter bedroom make-over for years but I kept putting her off. For some reason I was afraid to tackle the challenge…HP is so much to live up to! I mean, first you have to decide if you want to go store bought HP or totally original and creative HP? If you go creative, how do you make it awesome and totally original? I finally agreed to do it, and our finished project turned out amazing, and very easy on the budget!
Cameron is very different from Skylar, in fact I can’t imagine two people being more different. She is much more laid back (lazy?) and less likely to get involved, perfectly content to let someone else do the work and surprise her. Like her Mom, she finds making decisions daunting…what if she makes a wrong choice?!
Thankfully, I already painted her room recently and it didn’t need to be repainted. I did make her work for it, though. Not only does she hate to clean, but she hates to throw anything away (she gets that honestly, too, for sure) so her room was a DISASTER area. As I planned and prepared for this project, she was tasked with cleaning all that mess. I told her I wouldn’t do a single thing to her room until it was completely cleaned and organized, a clean slate for me to work with. I also pointed out that there was no room in a Hogwarts dorm for dollhouses, much less THREE doll houses. Yes, she had three because as her little sister outgrew them she couldn’t bare to let them go. She took me at my word, and spent days cleaning, organizing and discarding…even letting go of all three dollhouses. We decided to go with an authentic Hogwarts feel, versus store bought. Trendy stores like Pottery Barn and Hot Topic have some beautiful bedding sets and accessories available for the HP theme, but none of them felt authentic to Hogwarts, so we created our own. We’ve been to the Wizarding World at Universal twice, and the second time I paid close attention to the details that made it amazing. I was definitely looking for inspiration, and I think I found it! We were very lucky that my Mom was an antique (or junk?) collector, so our home was already filled with tons of treasures, many I didn’t know what to do with until this project, and they were literally taking up space and collecting dust. I went through our home, choosing pieces that would fit the theme and could be easily switched out, or lived without altogether. Obviously we have allot of stuff, I collected everything you see in the pic below for the project and you can’t even tell I moved anything: an antique bedside table, a lamp that looks like an old oil lamp, an old rocking chair that belonged to my Great-grandmother from around the turn of the century, and a stuffed foot stool from about the same time period. I switched out a small wooden dresser from my room with the white one that had been in the room, and I found several antique looking frames in the closet (where I store all the art I don’t know what to do with). I gathered antique books and candlesticks, as well as some of the HP decor Cam had already collected. If you aren’t lucky enough to live in a home pretending to be a junk store, like we do, similar treasures can be found at almost any thrift or junk store. Usually you can find items like these at reasonable prices, too. None of them are priceless antiques, just old tokens. A few key pieces needed to be purchased: the 9 3/4 pillow, a Hogwarts Express poster, a black mosquito netting canopy and a burgundy bedding set, which I got for $49 from Amazon. This bedding set was the cheapest one we could find, and I almost didn’t order it because some of the reviews were terrible. However, once it arrived and we opened the package, it was obvious why the reviews were so bad: it was a wrinkled mess. Although I almost NEVER iron, out came the ironing board and I ironed the entire thing. Afterward it was beautiful and absolutely perfect!
I tried to design a cornice for above the bed, a wooden “box” that would be mounted to the ceiling, with curtains coming down at the corners, wanting it to be an authentic looking dorm bed, like in the movies. The cost of an actual four poster is ridiculous. Eventually I decided I was trying too hard, and purchased the simple $12 canopy instead. It gives the bed the same feel, without the expense or time. It literally took 5 minutes to hang it above the bed and it looks great. We tied the corner pieces together with gold ribbon to give the illusion of posts hidden in the fabric.
We made an Amazon wish list that included throw blankets, the tapestry blanket you see on the wall, sheets and decorative pillows and invited family members to purchase those things. Thankfully they did not disappoint! I did splurge and order one of the popular mermaid style sequined pillows with the Gryffindor crest printed on the silver side of the sequins. That $16 pillow is probably one of her favorite things about the room, she creates new designs in it almost daily.
I wanted the room to really have a dank feel, like actually stepping into a castle. After looking at what felt like millions of photos, the best way to achieve that seemed to be to create a dominant accent wall, turning her windows into castle windows and adding faux stone. I created a template by deciding the size I wanted each window and the pattern I wanted to use, then drawing one onto a large piece of craft paper and carefully cutting it out. A 4 x 8 sheet of foam board was perfect for the long wall of windows, which needed three arched windows. I cut the foam down to the exact size of her window opening, then traced the template onto the foam several times, measuring to make sure they were spaced correctly. The window patterns were cut out with an exacto knife, the edges left rough for the stone texture. Then I used a roller to paint the whole thing antique white. The windows had some modern cross bars that didn’t really work because they were large squares. You could only see some of the lines once the cutout was in place, and it looked strange. Using standard black electrical tape, I added to the existing lines to create a new crisscross pattern on the bottom half of her windows. This made it look like iron bars in the castle windows once the styrofoam was in. They aren’t perfect, but it’s good enough to fool the eye!
The stone wall on the bottom portion is actually a super cheap roll of plastic “theme setter” material printed with a stone pattern. The roll cost about $16 on Amazon. At first I was disappointed with it because it was thinner than I expected, and had no texture. Because of time and money constraints, I decided to try it anyway, and as you can see from the photos it doesn’t look half bad!
I had hoped to use the picture frames to create a wall of portraits, like the Headmasters portraits in the movies. Although you can find and print tons of things from the internet, I chose to leave the frames empty for now. Mainly because we couldn’t decide which images to use! We chose 3 large frames, all different shapes, painted them the same gold color and put them on the wall empty. They are like place holders for the finished project, I suppose. Cam wants me to paint portraits of Dumbledore and one other person to go in the frames…jeesh, spoiled much?!
The final touch was the rug. My step-mom just HAPPENED to have the perfect red Persian style rug laying around in her shed. I couldn’t believe our luck!
There are some additional projects we plan to do, as well. Eventually we will add floating candles and flying keys, both of which have tutorials on youtube.com. Future blog post tutorials, maybe? So, with a little bit of money, I think only spent about $100, plus some generous gifts from family, a little bit of creativity and a cache of antiques, we created a pretty amazing Harry Potter themed bedroom. The moral of my story? Use what you have, and think outside the box!
After the room was finished, glancing in there as I walked by would make my breath catch…it really is like looking into another world and it was initially quite shocking to have such a room in our home. Cameron loves it so much that she’s made her bed every day since her birthday almost 5 months ago, and always keeps it clean!
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