Room by Room: Bedrooms
Much of the floor plans of our homes are dedicated to extra bedrooms for extra people. Most often these people are little giggling bundles of chaos and delight but sometimes they’re also the sick, needy, or elderly. These rooms are spare areas that have doors that close, creating privacy.
Everyone in our homes, including ourselves, needs a place of privacy. We all need places to step away from life and shut ourselves away. We all need a door we can close and a place to store our treasures, personal items, and clothing.
Function: A place of semi-privacy for children, visitors, or work and personal storage away from the more communal places in the home. It is a place to give children, elderly parents, roommates, or visitors a place to retreat, a place for the people we tend to call their own.
Children’s Rooms: Young children obviously don’t need privacy. Teens need shepherded-privacy. They need to have testing places with a good and wise safety net. All children should enjoy their rooms. This is a great way to give them a place to practice cleanliness and order. Plus, as they get older, it is a great place to encourage decorating. For daughters, especially, this is a place they can start practicing decorating and making a cozy hospitable place. Encourage your daughters in this. Don’t discard the idea of getting your daughter a hope chest to start collecting things for her own future home. The main thing is to help your kids manage their cleanliness and order. Simple systems, not too many toys, and places to store things.
For large families, many children will have their own little “offices” in their bedrooms to work on homework or their daily school work, especially as they get older. If we have roommates or elderly parents living with us, they will probably also have some sort of workspace in the room. Children love having their own desks and places to create. If you have the space, consider giving your kids desks in their rooms.
Side Note: I would strongly encourage parents to consider and communicate the privacy levels of bedrooms to their children at different ages. While privacy is a privilege they must learn to handle, it is still your home and you are still the law and protector of your children.
Office: This place of privacy can serve easily as a home office for husbands, women who work from home, or home businesses. They can also serve as libraries or command centers or homeschool rooms. The point is, a bedroom can be used for these more work-type spaces because they have doors that can shut the room away – either closing the chaos off from the rest of the house or the chaos of the house from the office. It is also a good way to keep non-home work from bleeding into the house, creating an environment of zero rest. It can keep the burdens of work from always being on our shoulders ruining the home’s safety and calm.
Guest Room: A guest room is a beautiful way to be able to offer a private place to someone in need who isn’t part of the immediate family. It can be used for extra storage as long as you keep the guest always in mind. Making a space for visitors to stay the night is rewarding work.
These rooms often function as places to safely sleep. Sleep is a vulnerable time and we all need a place we can cuddle in with all our stuffed animals and dream. Our guests need a place they can feel relaxed enough to sleep peacefully. Keep sleep in mind both as a function and as a beauty. Beyond privacy, the goal of these spaces is sleep.
These rooms are also often places of storage. We all have clothes and toys that are our own and don’t belong in communal spaces. They need places to live and bedrooms are a perfect spot. From dolls to action figures, favorite dresses to favorite hoodies, and growing interests to favorite animals, bedrooms allow the people in our homes to have a place they can be themselves with their stuff.
Beauty: As you can see from the section above, bedrooms provide a wonderful opportunity for beautifying the home. Bedrooms shouldn’t be neglected because it’s easy to hide the mess behind the door. It’s easy to forget about rooms we, as the homemaker, don’t visit often or that have been delegated as the spaces of others. We need to continue to own these spaces because they’re under our roofs.
So, all together now: Clean and Orderly! This is the first step to beauty. Clean and orderly. This is a challenge for all three different uses of the rooms. Kids are walking messes. Offices get cluttered. Guest rooms stagnate. (I’m looking askew at my husband’s office that needs to be dusted.) We must take this responsibility on, not to create lazy kids, but as managers who are ultimately responsible.
You want to use this space to give your children room to practice. We don’t suddenly know how to clean on our 18th birthday as if we were bopped on the head by our fairy godmother. Your children need to practice cleaning, organizing, and displaying/decorating. Their bedrooms are a wonderful place to allow them to learn. I do recommend that you enforce cleanliness. This is still your home. It needs to be clean for your sake and theirs. Make sure this is communicated, taught, and enforced.
As for decorating, beds and bedding are the first important step for the kids’ room and the guest room. Both are worth investing in because God has created us as creatures who need sleep and lots of it. Make sure the beds are easy to make, and the bedding is easy to wash in both rooms.
All three rooms will need some level of cozy sprinkled about them because they’re in our homes. They all need things like rugs, lamps, chairs, throws, pillows, textures, colors, places to curl up to read, and room to play. This is a place for our children, our guests, and our work to be and to be cozy. Offices do need to have a sense of smart energy, but that doesn’t mean no cozy should be considered.
Bedrooms can be an interesting element in our homes because they’re utilized as places of privacy. But that privacy or training ground of privacy doesn’t remove them from our overarching responsibilities. We need to make sure we’re not neglecting these spaces, but embracing them! We need to see the opportunity to train our children while also giving them space to practice. We need to make sure we’re not limiting our vision for these rooms just because they’re for working, infrequent, small, or elderly people.
Bedrooms can be a great way to be adventurous. They’re a place we can test decorating, give our children room to paint everything black, or pink, or cover walls with posters. Bedrooms are places we can experiment or tackle bigger projects because we can shut the door. What have you never been brave enough to try in a main space that could be played with in a bedroom?
No matter what, we HearthKeepers cling to the delight that is homemaking in every room, even the ones with doors. And sometimes, they’re even more fun!
