Vintage Decorating Ideas for a Little Boy's Room

Texture

• Create texture in your boy's room with vintage fabrics. Use bedspreads, curtains, rugs and lampshades that feature vintage themes, such as old-fashioned firetrucks, cars and airplanes. For a Western theme, choose prints with vintage cowboys and horses. Although commercial patterns are available, you might have just as much luck with secondhand stores and garage sales. If you sew, you can also use customized specialty fabrics to decorate your boy's room. For a more generic room without a specific theme, use quilted fabric to create a vintage feel.

Displays

• Reserve some wall space for displays of vintage items. You can use shelves and frames to show off vintage items including model airplanes, toy trains, vintage photos, crafts and other knickknacks in frames and curio cabinets or on display shelves. Use antique curio cabinets with recessed lighting to accentuate special antiques or family heirlooms and add a bit of family history. Mobiles with antique airplanes, trains and cars are appropriate for a young boy's room.

Furniture

• Furnish your little boy's bedroom with antique items. Wrought iron and wood bed frames, rocking chairs, vintage dressers and lamps are appropriate decorations. Once again, secondhand stores can be great places to find unusual items, and you can repaint some items to make them fit your color scheme. Make plain bookshelves more vintage by adding a backdrop to the shelves, as described in "Woman's Day." Simply measure a piece of your favorite vintage fabric to fit the back of the shelves and mount it onto a foam board of the same size with adhesive glue. Attach the foam board onto the bookshelf with foam tape for an immediate facelift that doesn't require paint.

Accessories

• Accessorize bookshelves, beds and dressers with wooden toys, vintage stuffed animals, framed art and advertisements and plenty of antique books. "Country Living" magazine provides a few good examples of quirky accessories that are appropriate for a boy's room, such as the antique kitchen, duck lamp and drugstore advertisement in the kid's room galleries. To avoid clutter, provide vintage-style organizational items, such as antique trunks and toy chests, to store toys that are not in use.