Streamlined teen bedroom
Framed photos. Loose photos. Clay Cafe figurines. Medals. Buttons. Programs. Notes. Ticket stubs. Drawings. Posters. Lanyards. Stuffed animals. Jewellery. Tchotchkes.
These are just a few of the items that might be cluttering up a teen’s bedroom near you.
I was in the process of redecorating the bedroom of a lovely 13-year-old, and I knew I wanted to keep her stuff corralled so it looked as tidy as possible.
I decided we’d build a beautiful custom desk along one wall and stack deep wooden ledges above it for storing everything in one spot. Most important of all, the desk and ledges would be on the same wall as the door, so when you walked into her room, you’d be looking at a serene bed and gallery wall, not a ton of stuff.
Handy Husband took care of the desk, building it the same way he’s always built the desks for my home office: a sturdy base of 2x4s with a sheet of crisp white melamine for the top. Since the bedroom already had lots of wood doors and trim, I painted the base cream (Plaster by Fusion Mineral Paint) to keep
things soft.
I designed the ledges to be exactly the same length — six feet — so they’d stack neatly above the desk, and a whopping eight inches deep so they could hold knick-knacks, canvases, bulletin boards, frames, containers and anything else we threw at them. The little 1x2 at the front keeps anything from tumbling off the front, so you can really lean things back against the wall.
I painted the ledges the same shade as we painted the walls (Touch of Pink by Benjamin Moore), since we had extra, but they also would have looked great in white or cream.
We purposely hung the lowest ledge just a few inches above the surface of the desk to keep the
surface mostly clear. Then we added the whiteboard and bulletin board — the tallest items — so we made sure to leave enough clearance for them. The top two ledges were hung much closer together, and hold shorter items.
Now, these were the deepest, heaviest ledges we’d ever done, so we made sure to use heavyduty anchors and braces to ensure they’d stay up. Of course, I had to spray the braces gold to make them pretty, since they’d be visible under each ledge.
Loading up the ledges was so much fun. Ballet photos, dance programs, a mini chalkboard, figurines and plenty of frames. There was enough room to add some of her stuffies, too, but her mom decided we’d leave them out for the big reveal.
I’d also created two shadowboxes to collect a lot of the small stuff. One was a Disney-themed shadow box with her souvenirs — and even a broken Disney coffee mug that was a favourite of her mom — and the other was a miscellaneous collection of ticket stubs, buttons and lanyards. Because the second shadow box doesn’t have glass, she can actually keep adding to it by hot-glueing new items inside as she collects them.
At first I was puzzled by her collection of paper events wristbands, you know, the waxy kind you rip off at the end of the night? She had carefully saved seven of them, but they were badly wrinkled and didn’t look very good all piled up. I decided to put a little cotton batting and fabric inside a frame (with no glass) and pin the bracelets out flat, one above the other. It
ended up looking really cute. She can even keep adding to them.
The final touch was finding a space to corral her jewellery collection, which included piles of those colourful rubber bracelets. We’d already replaced the hardware on her dresser and nightstands, so I used those leftover wooden knobs to make a simple jewellery organizer. I just painted a scrap of 2x2, screwed the knobs into the front, and attached the whole thing to the wall behind her door.
The whole wall came together beautifully, and I love that she can rearrange the ledges any way she likes, as her tastes change. The best part is that no matter how full they get, the visual clutter is contained to just that one area above her new desk — and it’s not the first thing you see when you walk in her room. #winning