How old were you?
I was 13. My oldest sis had moved out and I got to move into her old room. I had been sharing a room with middle sis.

What did it look like?
It was loud, visually. I picked out some crazy wildly colorful confetti printed bedding. I sponge painted the ceiling various shades of yellow. It looked like the sky over the water just as the sun is rising(still my favorite time of day.) Clouds of pale yellow with a brighter yellow background. Bright colors on the walls. Placed photos of my friends on my desk under a sheet of glass.

Did you like what you did?
At the time, I loved it. Today, I'm not sure how I ever slept in there. A few years ago, I helped my parents repaint the upstairs back to neutral and it made me a little sad when I was rolling over that ceiling.

This was fun, ttodd. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

I was 11. We "had" to carpet over the wood flooring. I put in dark purple shag carpet and deep pink curtains & bedspread. My cousins came to visit and GUSHED over how lucky I was!

I was 12ish and I picked out bedding with a big cabbage rose pattern. The carpet was a dark burgundy with a few cream colored rugs. It tied in nice with the bedding. I had a white wicker vanity set etc. It was more on the country/shabby chic side. Picked out some art for the walls and tada. It was more grown up than other girls I went to school with but I didn't care. I liked it and I still think the bedding is pretty.

I don't know if picking a pink color for my bedroom walls when I was about 13 counts. I didn't even get to choose the exact color. I just told my mom pink.
When I was 17, we moved to Florida and bought an older house. It had wood floors in the bedroom and I loved that. My mom took me to look at a bedroom set she found in the paper that was vintage 1940's. A vanity with chair and mirror, an upright dresser, nightstand and bed. I was in love and begged her to buy it. Once we got it home and in my new bedroom with wood floor, we went shopping for bedding. I got to pick out an olive colored chenille spread and some drapes in olive or avocado green and turquoise--big floral on white ground. I then found an avocado green throw rug for the floor. How cool was I???
Oh...........and a lamp (used of course, my mom was a second-hand expert) with a black metal shade. All my accessories were black.

Red

Same age--13 or so. The only thing I really did was request pink, a white coverlet, and those big-eyed Keane prints that were popular then. So my room was filled with these girls with huge eyes and tears streaming down their faces. It made me oddly happy.

First room I really decorated completely was probably my college dorm room. Pink and green again but lots of straw flowers and some sort of place mat arrangement that I cut huge flowers out of and made into a wall hanging. The room quickly got so messy though that the "cuteness" of it disappeared into general college squalor.

I must have been about 14 years old, and shared my bedroom with my sister. We painted the walls a deep avocado green, and put burlap (from real burlap bags) on one wall for accent. I thought the burlap needed some kind of trim, so I unspooled many feet of worn out black typewriter ribbon, and edged the burlap with that. The crowning touch was a long, low table that I made with scraps of "found" weathered wood remnants from the river that ran behind our house. Once the burlap and the river smells wore off, hey, it was great!

We thought it was stunning and took many pictures, one with all kind of (lit) candles on the table and the two of us sitting in front of it, "meditating." To my mother's credit, she didn't touch the room until we were both off to college.

My family was poor (my parents were anti-materialistic hippie home-schoolers back in the 80's), and we lived in a huge former convent on church property. The wallpaper and plaster in my bedroom were peeling and crumbling, and there were cross silhouettes on two of the walls where the sun had faded the wallpaper over time, leaving the colors under the crosses untouched. It was what Anthropologie aspires to be, LOL!

From age 11 when we moved in, till I moved out at 18, I decorated the same way I do now, with stuff I found at thrift stores and garage sales.

Even then I was collecting portraits of ladies, and I would hang these paintings all over my room. These used to be much easier to find, and were never expensive. For some reason the supply has dried up drastically in the last few years, and the ones I do find are ridiculously priced.

When I was 12, at a garage sale for $0.25, I found a tattered red velvet bedspread that would now give me the shivers, it was so old and dirty, but I loved it then! Although my mother respected my attachment to it, she did insist that I sleep with a top sheet between me and it. Ha!

Later, at age 15, I found a matching hanging lamp with gold trim and red velvet shade. So very opium-den-chic.

This was all mixed ridiculously with a life-size James Dean poster taped to the door, bookshelves from stacking plastic milk crates, a collection of plastic Smurf figurines, and a huge gold-tone cat earring holder.

Oh my.

Joanna

What a fun thread! Great idea ttodd.
The first room I helped decorate I was ten. It was pink and red. Later turned to pink and orange. Incase you're too young to know, this was in the mid to late sixties. By 1972 when I turned sixteen I too wanted a red white and blue room. My Mom always had a Speigel catalog and I found the bedding and curtains in there. Those and most of my other RW&B items were gifts from family and friends for my birthday. I still have quite a few of the things. Including a tin upside down Uncle Sam hat trash can and the wall hangings my Grammy B crocheted for me.
Here's a photo I found while sorting through old photos earlier this year. I know there's more, but this is all I came up with. It must have been taken before my birthday party since the trash can and wall hangings aren't where I had them.
You can see my red plastic swag lamp by the window above my blue blow up chairs that my Daddy blew up all by himself. I never wanted to let the air out since he worked so hard to get that ready for me to sit on.
How about those suede boots gals? Anyone remember these and more popular chukka boots with the sticky soles?
My Grammy B also crocheted me the rag rug that under foot in the photo. I have a couple of them still.
{{gwi:1775692}}

At age fourteen our daughter decided she wanted very bright yellow walls over her pretty pink walls with oh so feminine navy and pink hanky like wall border that my Mom and I had done together. It wasn't easy to let her since my Mom (who had passed just four years before) and I painted the room together. But remembering my Mom letting me make the decisions for my own rooms since age ten, I couldn't say no. We bought the paint at Sears and before it was painted I got sick. Katie didn't want to wait and painted it herself. I was too weak to keep her from doing so. Though when I was feeling better the next week I helped her decorate the blank wallpaper border using craftfoam alphabet and other shaped stamps. We picked out favorite sayings and Bible versese she liked. This is what it looked like after we moved out....

Oh gosh. Can we not talk about that? Let's just say that I was the sticky-tack queen.

Once I tied flowers to fishing line to hang from the ceiling light.

Then there was the time I made designs on huge sheets of tracing paper and hung them in the window so it would look etched.

How my mother survived the horrors, I have no clue.

Fun thread!

I was about 12, I think. I'll tell you my vision, and then the reality.

Vision: I really, really wanted an old white bed with spindles, periwinkle walls, and a down comforter. (That was about as far as I got with my planning!)

What I got: Laminate "Scandinavian" white furniture and rasberry walls with a beige comforter. I never thought the comforter went, hated the strong color on the walls, and the cold feeling from the furniture.

Next time I got to decorate . . .I was 14, we moved (my dad had died), I got the smallest room so I got to redo it while my sis inherited my furniture:
Very light peach rug, mahogany bed (I don't know if it was antique, but at least vintage) with pineapple posts, an old quilt (log cabin pattern, I think, with a lot of browns), and a dresser that wasn't from a set but was similar in tone (also at least vintage). I had a lovely dried flower wreath over my bed. I looooooved that room. It was super small, but cozy.

DD (7) told me the other day that she didn't want to grow up because she would have to look at boring things, like curtains . . .I told her that by the time I was 10, I would spend hours pouring over old decorating magazines my neighbor gave me . . .this was MY interest, but it certainly did not mean it would be hers when she gets older!

When I was 12, early to mid 60's, my bedroom was to die for. Ivoire matelasse and matching, scalloped pillow cover, over a French blue dust ruffle, mix and match wood and painted antique tables and dressers, blue floral chair (which I tossed all my clothes on) and beautiful drapes.

Then I turned 13 and decided, because I was a teenager, I should be able to decorate my own room. DM wanted my old one to stay as-is, so moved me to a smaller one. Being a decorator, she shuddered at my every move. I now know why. :) End result was purple walls with a bright green chenille bedspread and purple stuffed animals. I don't even remember the rest, but today I can still remember the first room in perfect detail.

It doesn't pay to rebel against a pro.

anele, I'm so sorry you lost your Daddy so young. Your darling daughter sounds like a hoot though. How cute..."didn't want to grow up because she would have to look at boring things, like curtains ". Too cute!

This is just so fun reading all the wild ideas we had as children when it came to decorating! I can tell I'm not the only one that feels they are wonderfully cherrished memories.

I was probably 14 or so before I actually "decorated" anything, other than covering every inch of some really horrible 1950s yellow-and-white-stripes-with-tiny-shiny-gold-flowers wallpaper with posters and pages torn from the pop-star magazines. My parents didn't really believe in wasting money on frivolous things like decorating so if I wanted anything I had to pay for it myself and work with the things I already had as-is. They were very much into "use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" and decorating was one of the things they could really do without. (Well, my mother did decorate more - especially during her "country clutter" phase - and was the yard-sale queen but I didn't live with her because I didn't get along with my stepfather.)

I had a tiny bedroom, less than 10x10, and the closet was a door across one corner of the room with a few hooks inside (which I think my folks secretly liked because it meant less shopping for clothes!). Anyway, when I was 14 I broke the bed that came with my horrible Sears French Provincial set and for a couple of years I had the mattress and box spring on the floor. :-) I put an old bookshelf at the top as a headboard, where I put my cassette player and cassettes and a reading lamp. I had a navy and white quilt made of bandanas my aunt made, just a bunch of bandanas sewn together with a backing, so I was kind of stuck with a blue-based color scheme. The (rented) house came with white aluminum blinds and once I got rid of those horrible Priscilla curtains (very much a fad about 10 years before and they just kept following me around) I just slid the curtain rod through the top hems of white twin-size sheets and covered that awful fussy white dresser with another sheet. I talked the landlord into letting me paint the walls as long as I paid for the paint and I think he was envisioning a nice girly-pink or beige... I painted the walls midnight blue and sponged them with half a dozen different shades of blue I made by mixing the blue with white paint. I did it in one long day when my parents weren't home. I liked it, it was like being in a snowstorm at night, but my dad was about ready to throttle me. (It took three coats of primer and two coats of paint to cover it up.) I cut back my posters to a dozen or so ;-) and framed them with those horrid snap-together black plastic frames from KMart, but that looked better than just scotch-taping them to the walls!

When I was 16 my parents gave me a double bed for my birthday (with the intent that I take it with me when I moved out on my own) and I went through this weird little '80s-modernist/Deco phase. I bought a carpet remnant in a medium gray and repainted the walls dove gray. Found a set of Marimekko sheets in a clearance bin - white with geometric patterns in black, red, and electric blue - and ran with those colors. I still had that dang bandana quilt (and it stayed around until long after I'd graduated from college and I was SO sick of it... that whole "wear it out" thing really stuck) but I covered it with a red blanket. I got rid of that icky dresser and put all my clothes in stacked red milk crates. My then-boyfriend gave me a gigantic Patrick Nagel print (80s, remember? LOL) and I replaced the brass swing-arm lamp I had during the "blue period" ;-) with a red and black modernish one. Spray-painted a few things I had (got in deep trouble for that) shiny black. My parents moved to another very tiny house when I went to college the next year; my bed and a few small things went into the spare bedroom at the new house to act as a guest room but pretty much everything decorative ended up at Goodwill because my folks hated just about all of it. :-/

Well, I just turned 50 and any day now I think I'll give it a try...

Oh man, I was a newleywed of 21.
We did our dining room over, that was 1980.
Had to coolest yellow/orangish flowered wallpaper, it had a white background and I so loved it. We had bought a great glass dining room table with woodard style metal chairs. We (hubby helped) covered the seats and were so happy with the results. Man, we even had a yellow phone.
What a blast from the past!
We left the room that way for probably 8 or 10 years until we got tired of washing boy handprints off the underside of the glass table!
Sold that baby and got a great old oak table and chairs.
The rest is history...so became our love of antiques!
Karen L

When I was 14 I chose the sofa (rich blue fabric, tuxedo style), 2 club chairs (cream, blue and brown wide stripes), rug, tables and lamps for my parents' living room. The biggest mistake was my choosing a really deep shag rug - three shades of blue. God knows what was lost in there over all the years. My style at that time was very contemporary. The lamps were chrome cylinders with black shades. I now have the table lamps plus the chrome floor lamp from those days.

Lamp shown at right side of bed is now in another room:

I was sixteen and my parents had split up. My mother moved into a Mediterranean revival apartment complex on the edge of the city that had been built in 1925. It had high ceilings, built-ins, a fireplace, fabulous moulding, casement windows, archways and beautiful hardwood floors. Really amazing.

We went to Scan Design and I picked out two off-white love seats in a nubby fabric. We set them in an L, adjacent to the fireplace. The coffee table was a rattan base with a glass top. I think there was an area rug with a similarly earthy woven feeling in an oatmeal color. By the front door, there was an antique black and rush Windsor chair that looked like a sculpture against the white walls.

For the dining room, we chose a butcher block table and four blonde Breuer chairs. Of course there was a huge potted ficus that would periodically decorate the floor with its leaves.

I remember feeling like I was making the choices that day, but maybe Mom was just being generous with me. It was a radical departure from the early American carp we'd had before the divorce. It felt modern and spare and just right in a new life/new world.

When I was nineteen I helped my Father do a condo in Florida from the concrete floors up. It was the first time I made a strong pitch for color. He wanted every thing beige. I insisted in injecting some aqua and coral, the ubiquitous Florida Accent Colors of the early 80's. We got a patterned sofa with a bit of coral in it and I convinced him that the side chairs should be a soft coral color, too. Looked great at the time. Now, I think it would give me nightmares! :-)

Thank you, Just! I think it is almost sadder now that I have kids of my own, that they don't know either grandfather. (My FIL passed away a year before DH and I got married, due to medical malpractice.)

I, too, love reading these stories!

Parma, do you have pics of the original bedroom? Sounds like heaven!

Thise blue bedspreads w/ white stars was EXACTLY what I need in my R, W & B room! Where were they when I needed them?

When I came back from the Marine Corps my mom let me redecorate the room again (21yrs old this time). Radically different and I got a lot of furniture from IKEA. Those white IKEA bureaus are still w/ me in our boys rm. Must have been my 1st good decorating choice.

I did grass-green and white. White walls, white ruffled curtains with green tie-backs, green and white checked bedspread, hardwood floors with white shag throw rugs. Lots of green pillows and accents. No other color was allowed :-) I loved it! My mom said she did too but hmmmmm I should ask her now if she was stroking my ego or if she really did lol.

The summer I was 12, my younger sister was allowed to 'move' downstairs to the spare bedroom in the basement for the summer. She decorated with reds and greens, a strawberry theme.

I stayed upstairs in the room with two twin canopy beds and the wide windows on two walls. My Mother had recently made a pair of bedspreads featuring huge blotchy, impressionistic yellow roses, and she was justifiably proud of her efforts. She was a better than average seamstress, and these were made with real padded bedspread fabric) I was stuck with them.

Anyway, not being allowed to paint, and having all that *yellow* there already, I went with lemons. I saved enough money to buy two sets of bright yellow enamel ware plates, cups and bowls to put on the dresser, plus a huge milk glass bowl from a yard sale that I filled with plastic lemons. This was back when you had real 5 & 10 stores, and they sold fabric, and I remember paying a quarter for enough lemon printed fabric to cover the dresser and about half the room, if I'd had a mind to. I had to fold the fabric up out of the way when I needed to get in the drawers, but I liked the way it looked like a table with the place settings. There was enough fabric left over to cut two strips (using pinking shears so I wouldn't have to hem them - I was always lazy) to drape over the top of the sheer curtains; a valance looking thing, although I didn't know what they were called then. Can you tell I spent time reading my Mother's Better Homes and Gardens magazines?

I had a pet turtle in one of those little plastic dishes with the fake palm tree, and I used Elmer's glue to put yellow rick rack around the outside of his bowl. Everytime I changed the water, I had to reglue the trim. Though I was tempted to, I did not paint his shell, because the man at the pet shop said it would smother him. Still, he was a very festive reptile. I also tied rick rack bows on the tops of the canopy bed poles, and glued rick rack around the baby ben alarm clock.

But looking back, the piece de_resistance was a small bush I'd dug up from the woods nearby, and potted up in a 2 pound coffee can painted white with yellow rick rack trim. Then I tied plastic lemons all over it and sat it on the dresser/fake table between the plates. Even after it began to loose it's leaves and I had to 'rake' the dresser everyday, I thought it was beautiful. By mid July, I was allowed to pack the bedspreads in the closet and use a couple of lightweight feedsack quilts my Great Aunt had made instead. I also picked out two embroidered pillowcases and set them on top instead of 'making' the bed by tucking them under the covers. They didn't "match" like the bedspreads, but I loved them, because it reminded me of visiting family on vacation. I still remember the different prints on those two quilts.