Empty Nesting Ideas

If your parents are anything like mine, then I assume that the first time you came home from university or your gap year you found that your bedroom was turned into a room of leisure. All your memories, posters, all 20 stuffed animals packed away lovingly and a massage chair facing a flat plasma screen, where your bed once was now stood.

This is for the empty nesters.

When I came home, excited to be sleeping in my bed for the first time after a year and a half of gallivanting and playing au pair I was thrilled that I would be in my childhood space – that when I looked up I’d have Kurt Cobain’s blue eyes staring down at me, that I would be able to reach over to my bookshelf and pull my favourite book out… Alas! When I walked into my former room, I found a big round table and shelves upon shelves filled with crafts, glue, paper and scrapbooks.

She had turned my space into a workstation for her crafts. The door I spent most of my life slamming was gone and in its place there was a bead curtain, which my mother made herself. She then assured me that I was more than welcome to stay in the guest bedroom.

The guest closet full (for once) of the clothes I left.

Most of us are lucky to have dedicated parents that waited until we left the house to start focusing on themselves, allowing a reasonable amount of time to pass before turning your bedroom into a home gym…

Or a nice a meditation room with all the trimmings (as remuneration for the 18 years spent running around after you in your pre-teens and waiting up for you to get home in your teens)…

My mother could never (ever) turn the guest bedroom into any kind of pleasure/leisure room. It’s there for guests. Even though my father was constantly begging her to push the bed up against the wall in the guest room and go mad with the rest of it, she never did. Not chic or feng shui enough for her, I suppose.

Much like her, my childhood friend’s parents (who didn’t have a guest or spare bedroom) waited for their children to leave to start on their renovations.

When her older brother left to become a bartender on a resort ship they turned his bedroom into a crafts room/office for her mother. When my friend left for university two years later they turned her bedroom into a man-cave for her father.

Me thinks empty nests are a great way to relive one’s personal space dreams and as evidenced by some of these images, nobody said you can’t make them chic.