A Harry Potter Room for Older Kids (and adults too!)
This post contains affiliate links.
What’s it like when your teenage boys ask you if they can have a Harry Potter room? Well….it’s confusing. On one hand you’re thrilled that they love to read and want to be surrounded by literary characters. On the other hand you know that everything you’ve ever seen with that theme is juvenile and, sorry, cheesy. So I put my mind to giving them their wish without sacrificing my desire to have a normal looking home. 🙂
In case you missed it, the reason we are redoing their room because we had a house fire. It’s been just over 6 months since our house fire and 2 1/2 months since we moved back into the house and we are JUST starting to feel back to normal. Moving back was wonderful, but it wasn’t the end of the recovery. We still had to put our entire home back together once the walls and roof were done. We had to replace so much furniture and go through everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. That junk drawer you used to kind of know what was in there….gone. The bathroom cabinet where you kept the extra toothpaste and bandaids…no more. Plus we are still rebuilding a bathroom and doing some exterior work that didn’t get taken care of during the first round of recovery.
Even though I had to replace so much, I really did NOT want it to look like a houseful of new stuff. I wanted it to feel homey and lived in, not sterile and new. I spent a lot of time searching flea markets and yard sales and online garage sales. A few pieces we needed I couldn’t find, so I built them. Since I have been traveling so much recently it felt like progress crept along too slowly. But finally, just 6 1/2 months after the fire we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and feeling the relief.
I am super excited to show you the first finished room today and it’s the best one because this is actually the room where the fire happened. These teen boys have been through a lot over the past few years. The fire just added to their trials and it’s been rough, but they’ve taken it like men. They really do bless me every day with their resiliency.
Ok enough sappiness…..let’s get to it!
This is an attic bedroom, so low angled ceilings and dormers. The access to the room before the fire was half stairs and half ladder. Not easy to get to. I’d thought many times about changing it, but never did since that would mean tearing up the house for a month or so. This awkward access plus a side opening on the stairs that went into a downstairs boys room worked really well when the kids were younger, but now that they’re growing up they needed more privacy. Here’s a photo of the steps/ladder right after the fire…
And here’s the attic room after all of the burned stuff was removed.
Don’t worry….it gets better from here. Because we had to have the stairs/ladder rebuilt anyway we had better steps put in and we removed the opening on the left to the downstairs room. I really appreciated the ingenuity of our framers in figuring the configuration out.
I used my Cricut Explore Air™ to make stencils for painting a quote on the wall. It sets the tone for what you will find upstairs.
Here’s whats around that corner at the top of the stairs….
People can’t believe that almost everything in the room is new. But it’s true! At least new to us. The old trunks came from various places. One belonged to a friend of mine and the travel trunk with drawers I found at the flea market. The trunks say, “I got here on a train.” The Hogwarts Express maybe?
My goal in designing the room was to make the HP references subtle. If you aren’t familiar with the stories you won’t even realize it. But for those who love the books as much as my kids do it’s totally obvious. I decided to go for an old world, inside a castle, boarding school look. There are nods to Harry Potter everywhere, but it’s not in your face.
The back wall is a focal point, but not distracting. I found the arched wooden window at a consignment store and knew it was perfect for this space since it’s interesting and mysterious. We added planks to the wall, outdoor lights (I converted hardwire exterior lights to corded) and plants to soften the wall. I wanted it to look like maybe part of the room led to a magical outside space
The boys and I built the beds ourselves. They wanted extra long beds (I have tall kids) and I couldn’t find beds that fit my vision, so I ordered the headboards on Wayfair.com and we built the frames to match. The bed frames are covered in black vinyl and look very elegant and masculine.
Each boy has his own private space with the beds on opposite sides of the room. I found the bedside tables at a store called At Home. I’ve discovered a lot of new places through this process like furniture stores, flea market websites, places with free WiFi…
There was room for them to have a table on both sides of the bed, which gives them more storage. One boy has throw pillows and lamp in the colors of Slytherin and the other is Hufflepuff (their chosen houses…or the houses that chose them).
Before the fire we had a railing above the stairwell, but teens needs more privacy so we changed it to a half wall. Then I hung the stained glass and added plants to make it more warm and welcoming on that side of the room.
The throw blankets at the ends of their beds have the names of various spells on them. We got those at Target. Fun! If you’re wondering, the wall color is Complex Gray by Behr.
There are 2 dormers upstairs so we turned them into private study spaces for each boy. This gives them a place to do school work or just be alone.
I found the corner desks and chairs at IKEA. The desks have long, narrow shelves on both sides that are pretty useless, so I added little storage boxes to create drawers. The boys like the extra spaces to put their collections….which we’re still working on replacing!
I used some elfa drawer systems (this is the only thing in the room that we had before the fire) to wall off the dormers and give the boys a place to keep their clothes. They use a closet in a room downstairs for their hanging clothes (which is what we did before the fire also). I cut 1/4″ plywood to fit the sides of the drawers and painted them to match their house colors and attached them with sticky back Velcro. Then I used my Cricut to make personalized crests for each one.
It made the dressers look nice on the sides facing the room and added a bit of whimsy (you always need a little whimsy!). Here’s my Slytherin dresser…
Speaking of whimsy, our floating candle bird cage gives several hints of what’s going on at Hogwarts. We thought about trying to find an owl, but decided that was a bit too much.
Yes, the candles light up and it looks really cool at night!
Between the two beds we had plenty of space for a fun reading/game playing/movie watching area. These boys are thrilled with having comfy man-looking chairs to sit quietly with a book. Believe it or not ALL of the books along the shelves are new since the fire. That was the first thing the boys asked to replace!
The two small club chairs are from IKEA and the pillow is from Target. The weird globe thingy on the suitcases is from Walmart.
That old travel trunk is my favorite find in the room! I got it at the flea market…you just have to be flexible and dedicated to finding what you need. The top of it is the perfect spot for the lantern diffuser. This new diffuser Young Living just released is the perfect thing for this room. The boys’ favorites to diffuse are peppermint+Citrus Fresh or Northern Light Black Spruce+orange. It smells very good up there (usually)!
After all these 2 guys have been through and losing everything, I’m so thrilled that their room is the first to be completely finished. There are still a lot of personal things they need to replace. We will have to replace all of their cold weather clothes soon and they both had a lot of collectibles (one of the boys lost his entire coin collection that he had been building for years) and that will all take time. But for now they have a fun, relaxing and quirky spot that’s a perfect mix of making mom and kids happy.
I think Harry, Ron and Hermione would approve, don’t you?
Come back next week to see how we recovered my daughter’s bedroom after the fire!
Here are a few other sources from the room. All of the links in this list are affiliate links…
Bedding & Desk drawer boxes – Target
Rug – flea market
Plants – IKEA
Books – Half-Price Books
HP fabric for pillows – Joanns (but I dipped it in tea so they wouldn’t look so white!)
Lamps – At Home, but we painted them ourselves so you could really get them anywhere
Small fans – Amazon
Window coverings – Blinds.com
Stencil vinyl for Cricut – Expressions Vinyl