We moved into this house about six years ago. In that time, we've had her original room setup (where we had just moved in), her initial redo a year later for furniture that fit the room and held her things properly, and then this past year we redid things as an 11 year old wants things far different than a 7 year old does.
From move in until right before the first change:
Everything had a place, but it was driving me nuts. None of the furniture matched as it was gathered as cheaply as possible (we had a very small budget at that point); there were 2 sets of name letters as she couldn't decide if she wanted to go with lighter or darker colors (see the 2 shades of curtains as well), and everything had a place but was visually very messy and crowded.
Thanks to the RoomArranger offered by Better Homes and Gardens, and a sale at Penney's on some Pottery Barn Kids - type modular furniture, we decided on this arrangement:
Her bed would change to a daybed with trundle so we didn't have to put the headboard on one wall; she'd gain two nightstands; a large television unit, and a desk with more storage. The table would go in front of the window and move out of the corner. This arrangement worked for a long time. The new room looked like this:
We changed the curtains (Lowe's), added the canopy and door entrance (Hearthsong..already owned the canopy but it kept getting pulled out of the ceiling on the previous bed because she'd roll over on it; the daybed prevented that from happening again!). We went off the green chair covers to her accent color and kept Tinkerbell's bedding for the bottom trundle bed. I covered the pink bins she had on the shelves with pretty Contact Paper for the cubbies, and used the 2 purple ones by her desk. We had cohesion! We had storage! We had prettiness! yay!
And the years went by and she grew older, and her needs changed some more. We decided on a new arrangement of her modular furniture and ditched the table entirely. We made better use of the longer wall in her room, let go of the nightstands (which had become hot spots for junk collection - TOO MANY little drawers), got her a comfy chair to read in, and left the space at the window open for some floor pillows and I'll be getting a big purple rug for the middle of the room for her and her friends to lounge on. This room should now take her through the teen years (I hope!). Please ignore my chop-job on the curtains, I still have to level them out at the window-sill level (had to cut them down from 80" lengths and did a horrible job mis-measuring).
We have not yet decided if the TV is staying since she mostly watches on her laptop, and we have a media room just outside her bedroom that she can watch TV with her friends on. It is potentially going to leave (along with the extra piece of modular stacker) and be replaced with a second fuzzy chair. To give a sense of scale, the dollhouse pictured is over 3 feet high; we had to remove the lower shelf in the spanner to make room for it.
Stuffed animals are still the bane of my existance, but we haven't found a better way of storing them except on top of the desk. She'll be needing this space in the next few years for trophies and things from school events and sports (she's already gotten her gold belt in karate and is nearly to the next level) so I'm not sure where the animals will end up (possibly on the window seat?). We've already gotten rid of over half of them. She also lacks the proper space for storing her books, but we're making do as best as we can with that for now. I may go to baskets for her desk and then organize the books within them by genre or series and that way we can use the full depth of the shelves as well to store more.
So it was a long and expensive journey, but I think we did well with it! Everything was done for under $1500 including all the furniture, bedding changes, paint, etc. The last re-set only ran about $200 for paint and supplies, bedding, and the blue chair and a few accessories. Yay for clearance!
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