Turn a child's bedroom into a cozy Hufflepuff Bedroom complete with faux brick wall. Get lots of ideas for this Harry Potter inspired design for your home.
Hi, Geoff here with a guest post. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed creating it!
I don't get to see my step-daughter Emily very much. With her turning 13 years old, her child years are almost over and her moody teen years are due to start! I figured that I had one last chance of making her Christmas extra special. What could be more special to a teenage girl than Harry Potter? With her asking for Harry Potter things for Christmas, I decided to take on a big project. I was going to turn her bedroom into The Hufflepuff Common Room from Hogwarts!
This project wasn't particularly hard, and can be replicated easily. You just have to have a little time on your hands and a lot of patience...
Create faux brick walls
Let's start off with the walls. We live in a wooden house that's painted completely white (inside and out). In order to make this bedroom look fit for a young witch or wizard, we would need to change that. We are going to make the walls look like stone inside a castle...
Tape the walls
First, take some masking tape and mark out the way you want your stones to look. I made them a foot tall and maybe two feet across. We have wooden planks for walls so I used the natural edges of the planks as the edges to my stones. Copy the design from an actual stone wall and you'll get the jist!
Sponge on the paint
After taping up your whole wall (which may take a few hours - depending on the size of the room) it's now time to paint! I used grey paint from my local hardware store. It doesn't really matter about the color or tone (as long as it looks castle-like) but make sure that the paint is "matte" not "glossy". I think the term used was "flat paint" at the store, but if you tell them you don't want shiny paint, they'll get the picture. This room took around half a gallon to complete.
You'll also need a sponge! The sponge is the important part here. If you were just to paint the walls with a brush you wouldn't get the right effect. Simply dip the sponge in the paint and dab it onto the wall until there's no more paint on your sponge! Simple! When you have gone over the whole room and let the paint dry it's time for the fun part, pulling off the tape! When you are done, the room already looks pretty awesome!
What a difference some paint makes
Decor and detail
The next thing we did was to change the decor. Depending on which "house" your kid is in, you'll want to use a different color scheme. Emily is in Hufflepuff so her colors are black and yellow. There's also Gryffindor (red and gold), Ravenclaw (blue and bronze) and Slytherin (green and silver). You can see here we bought black sheets for the bed, black curtains and a yellow throw blanket. There's also a badger (the Hufflepuff mascot) thrown in!
Wizard wall coverings
It's all in the details! The focal point of the room was a large Hufflepuff tapestry that we bought from Amazon. A trip to our local Ross stores uncovered a cool lamp, a golden goblet and supplies to make a broom. For the broom we bought a bunch of twigs (I think they were meant for flower-arranging) and tied them onto a piece of bamboo!
We also bought glow-in-the-dark stars and stuck them to the goblet and to the ceiling. We replaced a "hot pink" cloth drawer in her shelving unit with a black one for good measure!
Wizard goodies!
Here's a closer shot of the broom and corner unit. Note her wand on top. This was her Christmas present a couple of years ago! Make sure you have books scattered around and on the shelves too!
Hufflepuff Notices
For the final bit of decor we added a common room notice board with all of the latest Hogwarts notifications. For this, we went to a local craft store, bought a large yellow foam board and screwed it into the wall (you could also probably use sticky tape).
An online search found a few cool notices that we printed out and stuck to the board. You can even make your own by rubbing an old tea-bag onto some paper and burning the edges with a match. This will give your paper a cool, medieval feel.
Emily the witch
After all your hard work, the best part is yet to come! Set your camera recording and march your 13-year-old into their brand new Hufflepuff Bedroom!
