boy roomsRestoration Hardware

We have three boys.  The oldest will be 15 this year and my other two are 12 and 11.  Years ago I bought them all matching beds, two dressers and some book shelves for their rooms.  We never got further than that.  When I wrote out my home goals for 2011 I included the boys rooms (you can see photos of their current rooms at that link) and I never got to them.

Then something interesting began to happen this year…

boys room

They kept wanting to be together.  For the past year they each have had their own room but more and more I caught them asking to all sleep in what we call the playroom.  The playroom that has no toys. Here it is currently…

decorating a boys room

Actually, that’s not true here it is currently…

pre teen boy rooms

Oh wait, that’s not true either, here it is currently…

boy rooms

I just walked up and took this photo 90 seconds ago.  It’s really dark in there and I didn’t feel like setting up the tripod, but you get the idea.   Can you spot the three boys?  Two are mine, one is a friend.  They want to sleep in here every night.

At first I thought it was because of the TV. But then I remembered back when school was still in the two youngest still wanted to sleep in here, and did even without turning on the TV.

I secretly hate this room with its knee walls and weird wall parts jutting out every where.  There’s only about four feet of actual real wall space that reaches up high, the rest is weird walls.  It’s also the catch-all for everything in the house that doesn’t have a place. There are four chairs, two ottomans, three sofa tables, a sofa, a queen size bed, a coffee table a broken TV cabinet thing a bookshelf and even a twin mattress on the floor (the youngest boy dragged his mattress off his bed and has had it in this room for weeks? months?)

boy roomunsourced

But then I started wondering about the fact that the two younger boys want to be together.  The room is supposed to be a guest room but whenever a family comes to visit it never works out because the kids always want to watch a movie upstairs but that’s supposed to be the guest room and then all the kids fall asleep in there and then the guest parents are sleeping in twin beds in the boys rooms.

Maybe it would be better to let the youngest two share the bonus room and make a real guest room in one of their rooms?

DIY boys roomdesign sponge

There are definitely some cons: they’d have a TV in their room which I am not crazy about, there is no closet, you can see that room first thing as you walk up the stairs, I HATE the walls in that room and it would need to be painted.  The beds don’t fit in the window nooks which seems like such a perfect place for the beds to go.

The pros: the boys always listen to us when we tell them to turn the TV off, we have lots of closets in the house and really? boys only use them for hideouts and storage, if I did a good job on the room then everyone would see it first thing as they walked up the stairs!, the walls in the room already desperately need painted anyway, maybe we could rig some kind of neat bed/mattress thing in the nooks without using their real beds.

DIY boys roomdecor pad

So right now we are talking about it.  Not moving anything, not buying anything, just talking about the two youngest sharing the bonus room.  What happens when the oldest has a friend over to spend the night?  What happens in the winter when that room is cold because it’s over the garage?  What do I do with all of their tall bookshelves and beds that don’t fit?

decorating a boys room

BHG

I really would love to spend a little time making their rooms more special.  The downstairs is good, our room is good, the worst part of our house is the bonus room and their rooms.

I’d love to hear your thoughts–what would you do? do you hate knee walls too?