Creating an Animal Themed Room

Today is an easy way to create an animal themed room for a kids room or play room…or even classroom. Alternate Title: How I spilled a gallon of paint in the middle of the”animal themed” boys bedroom and made my own area rug to cover it up! Oh my! Home decorating never goes exactly as expected does it?

Animal Bedroom for Kids

A few weeks (or has it been months ago) we painted an accent wall in our boys room with a variety of animals.   This was inspired by these stock photos. I loved looking at the cacophony of animals and thought it would be fun to put on our wall.

Adding Animal Shapes to the Walls

Using a projector and a permanent marker, we traced the animals onto the wall and then filled in outlines with dark green paint. And somehow during our painting I stepped back… Oh! My!   I knocked a gallon of paint over on the floor.    

Getting Paint Out of Carpet

I was able to get most of the paint out.   And while you can kinds see a green hue where the paint was dumped, you can’t really tell from photos that there is green paint smack dab in the middle of the room. Boy, oh, boy – can your feet feel the “crunch”.

Make an Animal Rug

I needed a solution. This idea is not my own. I get to thank Elena, one of my dear friends, who came over looked at my puddle and said, “Make an animal rug!” Thanks Elena!! The boys love their “turtle rug”. We headed to our local home improvement store to see if we could “match” the carpet. Thanks Lowes for your exceptional assistance!   Matt at Lowes was able to match our carpet and they have remnants of lots of carpet on-hand.

Does Lowes have carpet remnants in stock?

Yes!  At our local Lowes, we have found carpet remnants to be super helpful for those quick and small home improvement tasks. Matt at Lowes also explained how we would need to “bind” the edges of the carpet to create a rug. Home with our carpet remnant, we traced a turtle on the back with a permanent marker.   We used a giant half circle for the turtle body and traced a bowl for the head/legs – so simple! After we traced it, we used a utility knife to cut out the carpet into the shape we needed.

Binding an area rug at home

To bind the edges we used a couple of spools of green ribbon – 3 inches wide. We also used a high temp glue guns/sticks, and I’d advise putting bandaids on your fingertips to help protect them from the heat as you have to press the ribbon into the carpet edge after you put the glue on.

We used about 1 glue stick every 8 inches – so plan on buying a TON.After you bind the ribbon to the top of the carpet, turn the carpet over and add a line of glue and press down the ribbon into the backing as well. Viola! You have an animal rug, made-to-order!

We chose to use the coordinating carpet for our animal rug because we were able to find the exact match, but you can see how a contrasting color or remnant that matched our paint color would work just as well.

Thanks to Lowes which gave Kids Activities Blog a gift certificate that covered the small expense of this project in 2012.  Check out some of our other DIY home projects: Bird House Makeover, Bathroom for kids and DIY toy box. Try these DIY Fabric Wall Letters!