My room is 12' by 10'. My wall does a dreadful slant, leaving me not being able to stand in more than half the room nor put furniture in.
I don't know how to move furniture or organize my clothes, store my stuffed animals other than leaving them on display, store doll stuff, or what to put in my empty drawers. I sure have plenty of stuff.
My room is also very dark. It has a window, but it's not on the side of the house with sunshine. I'm looking out on the back yard.
I think I posted this once before, but it didn't get through. Thank you for any feedback.
By Lena from Portland, ME
Add your voice! Click below to answer. ThriftyFun is powered by your wisdom!
A lot of houses have rooms like that. The room that my sisters and I had when we were kids was like that. It had two double beds in it with headboards. One side of the bed was against the wall. The only part of the room we could stand up in was in the middle of the room that could almost be called a hallway. Between the beds there was enough room that we could have put another bed, but there wouldn't have been room to get in and out any of the beds.
There was an east facing window, and under that we had an old chest that as I got older I used it for a "hope" chest. There wasn't anything pretty about this chest. Being I was a teenager I had a small dresser, more like the old fashioned commodes, and one of my aunts gave me an old ottoman that she was going to throw away to sit on in front of the dresser. On the west end of the bedroom there was a small kind of an entry way about 3x3. My uncle built a clothes rack for me to hang my clothes on and my little sister's clothes were kept downstairs in my parents bedroom. The floor was painted wood, with no rugs.
Each of us kids had one stuffed animal and one doll. Each doll had two or three outfits. We kept our toys in a cardboard box. Nothing in the room matched, bedspreads or anything. If you have empty drawers, as you stated you are lucky, put whatever fits in them. If you need more storage you can get those plastic carts with drawers in them. They are inexpensive, but not pretty. My opinion is if a person is trying to be economical it doesn't matter.
When I was growing up, we were really hard up. Three of us shared this room and my brother had his own room. He had the slanted ceilings too. He had a double bed and a small dresser identical to the one in our bedroom. For clothes that had to be hung, somewhere along the line somebody had put some coat hooks up on one wall for hanging clothes.
Hi Lena,
Since you only have the one window, make sure you put in a blind for privacy at night & white sheers to allow all possible light in, during the day. Then, I suggest you paint the walls in a neutral pale tan color, it will make the room look larger. The ceiling & trim should be white. You can utilize the back of the door with hooks or nails for excess coats & handbags. With the slanted wall I would get storage boxes & stack them up.
You can even get New Free cardboard boxes at the post office & they can be painted on the outside same color as your walls, with regular laytex paint, then stacked to make nooks for your belongings! The would be open facing you & not from the top of the box. Add some hot glue or Elmers to keep them together & in place! There are also bed boosters that increase the height of your bed allowing more storage underneath. Good Luck! Sincerely, Missy in O HI O
I liked the suggestions about storage along the 'short side' of the room. Might even find some benches with lids at garage sales or thrift shops/second-hand shops, and paint them in the colors you want? One thing I haven't seen suggested is a mirror. It's always good to have a full-length mirror anyway. IMHO everyone should have one, based on the things I see when out in crowds! ;) You can buy those for $12 or less at a discount store like Walmart or Meijer or Menards or Lowes, or even drugstores like RiteAid etc.!
I would cover the intire short wall with deep book cases. You can place baskets on the shelves for storage. This would enable you to use less furnature and give you more room on the other side.
Definitely use mirrors. Places like Wal-mart or home finishing stores sell square or octagonal ones that are meant to be used under plates at tables during the holidays. Place one under your lamps and/or behind the lamps to reflect light out into the room. Since the walls are slanted, making hanging large objects hard to hang, you can have mirror cut to fit picture frames.
You can hang these in patterns to mimic windows (and reflect light). Definitely place your bed under the slope, since you lie down in it anyway, reserving the taller ceiling for things you need to do standing, like getting dressed. We have the lower slopes closed off into closets and storage. Even though they're not too tall, they are just the right height for hanging tops, jackets, pants over hangers, etc.
If you're short on money, you can enclose the areas with rods mounted to the walls and just gather fabric to cover them. It will look like the bottom of the walls are covered with shirred fabric and no one will know it's storage. The bookcases are a great idea, not to mention relatively cheap.
If you push a few them up to the wall, it will look like built-in storage, and you can place seldom used things behind them, like out-of-season clothing. Look for short dressers at garage sales. Paint them white once you get them home to place under the slopes.
The white paint will make them seem to disappear and make the room look bigger. And stick with light wall colors to make the room appear larger; gloss or semi-gloss to reflect more light.
There are some great decorating ideas here already. Mine is a little unconventional, but practical. I suggest tucking the foot of your bed under the short side of the room, with your headboard on the roomy side. This would provide as much walking space as possible. Feet don't need height when you lie in bed! Back your headboard with a bench, vanity or narrow desk to hold what would normally be on a nightstand. During the day, you could sit at this table comfortably, too!
I like Mikistewart's idea, but it sounds a little impractical when it comes to making up your bed every morning and changing your bed sheets. You'd have to crawl to reach the foot of the bed! My suggestion is to turn the space into a movable closet system.
You can get some wooden cubby crates, set them on their side and stack them two or three high, depending on the height of your wall slant to give you storage room hidden behind the crates. Add some small wheels under the bottom crates and use small screws to secure the upper crates to the lower crates. This will create a movable "wall" of shelves for storing shoes, purses, books, and what-nots. Leave yourself enough room at the end of your "shelf wall" for a hanging bar to hang shirts, pants, and short skirts.
You can get some clear plastic tubs to fit in behind your wall of shelves to give you additional storage for out of season clothes (winter clothes during summer months and vice versa), extra blankets, and items you don't need everyday. The rollers on the shelves make it easy to move them to reach the tubs behind them.
For the hanging part of your closet system, buy some extra long curtains and hang them using the flat, white standard curtain rods or even some decorative round curtain rods with decorative hooks. Mark the curtains where they overlay on the floor with white chalk or a fabric pencil and cut them two inches past this mark. Hem the curtains to create custom sized closet curtains to hide the hanging bar and your clothes.
You can get some large wooden dowels, some white plastic pipes, or even metal rods for hanging your clothes. Add one of those flat, round door stops you see on walls behind the doorknobs to each end of your rod with some hot glue or vinyl adhesive caulking to prevent the rods from slipping out of the chains.
Hang your rod using ceiling hooks (make sure you secure them to studs or they will fall out of the wall) and some medium sized plant hanging chains. Put the first and last links of the chain onto the hooks (cut it with bolt cutters if it's too long) and slide your hanging rod into the loop of chain. Create chain loops for each end of your hanging rod and the middle for extra support if you like.
You can even add small shoe box sized plastic tubs under your clothes for storing things like belts, scarves, and hats. If you don't have any place to store extra toiletries or office supplies, you can use these small plastic tubs for those items as well. Cardboard shoes boxes work well for this too, but you need to label them so you know what's in them.
You can also get a couple of those wire mesh hanging baskets for the kitchen and hang them in your room to display small stuffed animals, hair accessories, or even makeup. You can line them with some old scraps of fabric to keep things from slipping through the holes. You can store hair clips and claws to the chains that suspend the baskets and tie ribbons to the chains for your hair barrettes.
You can even get some small square baskets from Wal-Mart (they come 3 to a pack for around $1 each) and attach them to the wall with small cup hooks in a shelf pattern or go a little funky and hang them in a circle pattern for added fun. You can keep just about any kind of small trinkets, perfume bottles, cosmetics, and hair accessories in them. You can use them for your jewelry by adding some tiny plastic storage containers for earrings and lapel pins, and hanging your necklaces and bracelets from the holes in the sides of the baskets.
One idea I used in my daughter's room was to recycle the rail of an old baby crib. I used some large sized aluminum wire brackets (the kind that form a half circle and attach to the wall at each end) to secure the rail to the wall. Then I used some decorative ribbons to tie her stuffed animals to the rail so they would always be on display and she could still take them down to play with them.
You could use this same idea to hang your belts and scarves instead of stashing them into little plastic tubs or tie your stuffed animals to it. It can also be used to hang dresses, if attached high enough on the wall. Just use some pliers to turn the hook of wire hanger to make the dress hang flat against the rail. You can wrap the wire hanger in yarn or tie some old shoulder pads to the hanger to prevent rust stains on your clothes or hanger impressions on the shoulders.
Your room, as small as it is, has tons of potential storage space. Use your imagination and get creative with your space. You'd be amazed at what you can store in an awkward room.
Add your voice! Click below to answer. ThriftyFun is powered by your wisdom!
