My pal Janet and I put our heads together over the weekend to come up with some affordable ideas for a baseball theme room for Josh, who’s turning 12 and wanted a bedroom decorated to celebrate his favourite sport.
It’s hard to get more baseball crazy in decor than a baseball glove chair
so that would be our first choice, but the kid’s just a little too big for the only one we like, a soft stuffed fabric chair by Gund.
It’s a pretty realistic-looking baseball mitt and would be a really cool focal point for the bedroom, but as kids’ furniture goes it is sized for a younger child.
Fortunately the baseball itself offers some other great furniture options:
Ace Bayou’s baseball bean bag chair is a compact 24-inch chair great for slouching on while gaming or gabbing with friends. We’re going for a couple of these bean bags, which can double as an ottoman for the brown glove-leather armchair that we chose for the main seating.
Another option we looked at hard was a gaming rocker in a baseball theme fabric
but Josh and his friends tend to do their game-playing down in the family room, so the gaming rockers will come up for consideration when it’s time to redecorate that room in its turn. Right now, though, our focus is on the baseball theme bedroom.
It’s not a large bedroom (and Janet’s budget isn’t very large either) so we decided to keep the perfectly serviceable textured taupe carpet, drapes, and bedding — with the addition of a $20 bedside mat that had the logo of Josh’s favourite team on it (found in the home decor section of our local DIY store), and a few inexpensive throw pillows in the team colours picked up on sale here and there.
Inspired by a wall shelf with a decorative baseball bracket,
we put together something similar using Josh’s existing bookshelf, a glue gun, and a few spare baseballs. It’s a great place for Josh to display his own batting trophies, and the treasured beginnings of his own baseball collection.
You can find headboards in a baseball theme, but we opted to stay with the existing wooden headboard — the trick of a theme room is not to overdo it, especially if the bedroom is quite small. Just a few key pieces of furniture and accessories, and you get the impact without risk of overdoing it.
As a final touch, Janet cut an X-shape in two baseballs and fitted one over each end of the plain old department-store curtain rod, for a great finishing detail!