I want to be honest with you about something before I even start.
If you’ve ever wondered whether giving your kids real decorating input is a good idea or a chaos spiral — this is the story of what actually happens. Spoiler: it’s both, and it’s worth it.
I didn’t let them decorate their room. That word — let — implies I was in control of the situation at some point.
Maria is eleven. She argued with me about this for four days straight. By day three I wasn’t letting her do anything. I was surrendering.
Here’s how it started.
The Negotiation (Which Is a Generous Word for What Happened)
Maria came to me in that particular way she has — calm, prepared, slightly terrifying — and told me she wanted to put K-pop posters on her bedroom wall. And a Stranger Things section. For her Funko Pops.
She’d clearly been thinking about this for a while. She had opinions about which wall. She had opinions about the arrangement.
I said I’d think about it.
This was a mistake. “I’ll think about it” to an eleven-year-old who has already thought about it is essentially an invitation to keep bringing it up until you say yes. Which she did. Every day.
Different angle each time — once she came at me with the argument that her room should reflect her personality, which, I have to say, was extremely good use of something I’d told her once about decorating.
Marina, who is eight, was watching all of this very carefully. Marina operates differently — she doesn’t argue, she just quietly decides things and then acts as though they were always decided.
By day two she had already mentally claimed the shelf above her bed for her own Funko Pops, which at that point included Eleven, the Demogorgon, and something from a K-pop group whose name I still can’t pronounce correctly despite being corrected many times.
What I actually wanted was a calm, cohesive room. Soft colours. Maybe some fairy lights. The kind of room that looks lovely and peaceful and absolutely nothing like what my children were proposing.
The One Thing I Said No To
Maria wanted to paint the ceiling.
I want to be clear: she had a specific colour in mind. It wasn’t a vague idea. She’d found it on her phone and shown me and the colour was — look, it was a lot. For a ceiling.
This was the line I held. Everything else we could discuss. The ceiling was staying white.
She accepted this with the dignity of someone who knows they’ve already won the main argument and can afford to concede the ceiling.
Which, in retrospect, is exactly what had happened.
The Saturday We Painted (Or Rather, the Saturday I Painted While Being Supervised)
We cleared the room on a Friday evening. Maria was extremely helpful in a directing capacity. Marina moved her Funko Pops to safety one by one, each one carried with both hands like something fragile and precious, which to be fair they are to her.
Saturday morning we painted. Soft white, which I’d chosen, because the ceiling negotiation had been draining and I didn’t have enough left in me to also fight about wall colour.
The walls were fine — honestly a good neutral base for what was coming.
What was coming was the posters.
Maria had more than I’d realised. I don’t know exactly when she’d acquired all of them. They came out of a folder she’d been keeping under her bed, apparently for some time, organised by category.
K-pop on one side, Stranger Things on the other. She’d already measured the wall. She had a plan drawn on graph paper.
I stood in the doorway and watched her put them up with a seriousness that I recognised. It was the same face I make when I’m hanging art. The small step back to check the alignment. The slight tilt of the head. The repositioning of the one that wasn’t quite right.
She has been watching me do this her whole life and I hadn’t noticed until that exact moment.
What Marina Did
Marina didn’t say much while all of this was happening. She waited until the room was done and the posters were up and Maria had declared it finished. Then she went to the shelf above her bed with her Funko Pops — she’d brought them back from their temporary home in the hallway, still carrying them two hands at a time — and she arranged them.
This took a while. She moved them, stood back, moved them again. Eleven at an angle. The Demogorgon at the back because he’s the tallest. The others in a line she adjusted several times until something about it satisfied her.
Then she stood back and looked at her shelf the way you look at something you made. Quiet and still and pleased.
I don’t know if she knew I was watching from the door. I didn’t say anything. It felt like the kind of moment that gets smaller if you put words on it.
What I Actually Thought When I Saw the Finished Room
I’m going to be honest: it doesn’t look like anything I would have designed.
The K-pop posters are bright. There are a lot of them. The Stranger Things corner has expanded since that first Saturday in ways I’ve decided not to monitor too closely. There is a signed photo of someone — I’ve been told who, I’ve forgotten — that Maria treats as the centrepiece of the whole wall.
It also doesn’t look like a catalogue. Or a Pinterest board. Or any of the beautiful, cohesive children’s rooms I’ve saved over the years with vague intentions.
It looks like Maria and Marina live there.
You can tell, walking past the open door, exactly who these people are. What they love. What they’d talk to you about for an hour if you gave them the chance. The room has a personality so specific that it could only belong to these two children.
I’ve been doing home décor for ten years. I’ve written about cohesion and colour palettes and the importance of a considered space. And I am telling you that this room — with its K-pop posters and its Funko Pop shelf and its complete disregard for my opinions about what looks good — is one of the most successfully decorated rooms in our home.
Because the people who live in it walk in and feel immediately, completely themselves.
What This Taught Me About Decorating
I think I’d been unconsciously decorating for an imaginary version of my home. The version that looks right. The version that photographs well. The version a guest would walk into and immediately understand as tasteful.
Maria and Marina don’t care about that version. They decorated for themselves — for the actual experience of waking up in that room every morning, of having friends come over and show them the signed photo and the Funko Pop arrangement, of feeling like the space belongs to them in a way that nothing I would have designed could have achieved.
Read Also: How to Design a Pink Bedroom That Makes Her Feel Like a Total Princess!
A room should feel like the person who lives in it made the decisions.
I knew that. I’ve said that. I just needed an eleven-year-old to argue with me for four days before I really understood it.
Katerina Lithopoulou is the founder of DIY Cozy Living. She has been decorating homes on a budget for over ten years — and occasionally losing decorating arguments to her daughters, Maria and Marina.
I’m Katerina Lithopoulou, co-creator of DIY Cozy Living. I’ve always loved the little things that make a space feel special. With a background in language and a passion for photography and cozy design, I enjoy turning everyday inspiration into simple ideas people can actually use.
My motto: “Cozy isn’t a trend — it’s a feeling.”
