Redecorating Kids Room: Finding the Perfect Rug

You knew it was coming! How can our 5 year old rug connoisseur not have a vintage rug in his room, right? Or at least this is what we have been thinking since we moved in.

A lot of people ask me for my input on rugs in kids rooms because as they are rooms for little people who are prone to mess and chaos, it can be a questionable decision to spend $$ on decorating it, and I get that completely! For our family dynamic, I know I spend a lot of time in this room and our son really does view it as his sanctuary. For this reason, it is a no brainer to have the rug simply be one that speaks to all of us collectively, but most importantly to our son. He has seconded my design decision which is to have the rug be light in color to bring more of a calm presence and coolness of color (as in opposite of yellowy warmth which the room has a lot of) which means it may be a riskier decision amidst children. I am telling myself that it will help me in setting rules, which admittedly I am not the best at -- rule #1 when the amazing gorgeous vintage or antique white-ish or light-ish rug goes down -- no food or drink in this room besides water. And (ahem) no guinea pigs on the thing! Yes, we have guinea pigs in the corner of this room. More on that later as decorating a room around a huge cage is well, not the easiest task I have ever been presented with.

For this room, I am also not making any other big design decisions yet other than the rug. I’ve known that the placement of the beds is staying the same so I have to work with that size wise. It presents a bit of an issue for the rug sizing because I could either go with one large rug or I could go with one long one in between the bed (which made the room feel smaller to me) or I could go with one small rug in between the beds which then breaks the room up into two parts and I would then need to figure out a rug for when you first walk in. I feel very torn still but definitely my two favorite options are super large to fill the room or super small and have two rugs. How does one figure out the exact size that would work? You could wing it of course but I have found this 90% of the time just does not work. What I always highly recommend is laying down white paper to create a contrast with the flooring to really see how it looks aesthetically — some folks use newspapers for this but for my eye this visual becomes too cluttered. Melissa and Doug set of two paper rolls is $13.99 on Amazon doubling as my white paper for rug sizing and art time for kids, and of course if you have scrap paper lying around this would work as well. You simply lay the paper down where you are thinking the rug would go and play around with it until it looks just right. For me and this project (see below the paper out and an area rug folded up to represent my measurement), I came up with 3’x3’. If I went large route the rug would need to be at least a foot under each furniture piece so based on my measurements of the room, 5-6’x9.5’-10.5’ would be ideal. Essentially in this situation I am presented with two options -- float a small rug between the furniture or have the rug occupy much of the room.