My six-year-old wanted us to redo her bedroom in an “Australian theme”. See: She wanted an excuse to have koala bears peppered through her room. Her name is Winnie and we call her Winnie Bear, Goo Bear (instead of Pooh Bear) or Bear so we’ve “inceptioned” her to love bears. Anyhow, trying to find girly koala shit that didn’t make her room look like a nursery posed a challenge. But we all know that’s never stopped me before.

Step one: Pick a theme.

Winnie already had koala bears and Australia as her theme so I had a general sense of what she was after.

Step two: Pick a color story.

Winnie’s favorite color is purple, so she begged to have a purple accent wall. I got the color “Lover’s Knot” by Behr and we painted her accent wall. After painting that, I knew we’d have to find some bedding with pops of purple in it.

From there, Winnie and I did a google shopping search for Koala bedspreads. She decided she liked this one best. To be honest, I think she liked that the koala on the pillowcase was wearing glasses as she’s had to start wearing glasses this year to see the board in school. I’m all for boosting her confidence so off we went! I got the bedding off a site called Bonanza and I wasn’t sure if it was legit but it was, it just took a couple weeks for the bed set to arrive. Once it did, I racked my brain on wall art I could find to go along with the bedding. Queue Google image search! I input a photo of her bedding into it and voila – it popped up this wall art from an entirely different company. The little koala matched perfectly!

Step 3: Find some wall art

For her other walls, I reused a custom mini surfboard I had made for Winnie when she was still in a nursery. I got it off this shop on Etsy. You get to customize it any way you want and pick all of the colors! Luckily, her nursery was tropical themed so the colors of her surfboard still went well with her Australia theme. Then, I went to good ol’ Hobby Lobby and found a rainbow shelf for her other wall. I got this koala print hamper for her closet off of Amazon. I also got her a koala nightlight and koala eyeglass stand for her nightstand to have more koalas scattered about.

Then, I got this purple canopy to go over her bed. I found this adorable koala throw pillow to add on top of her bed too. Winnie wanted a little reading nook in the corner of her room so I got this koala rope basket to hold her books in. And because her comforter had a lot of peach in it, I got this peach koala bean bag chair from Target for her to sit in.

Lastly, I needed one more piece of art to pull together purple and peach. (They’re a stranger color combo to find than you might think!) I searched online for hours to get inspiration. Then I realized the answer was right in front of me. If we were doing an “Australia themed room”, what better piece de resistance than a fucking map of Australia? From there, I just googled “purple and peach maps of Australia” and finally found this.

I will warn you – this came off a website that is similar to Society6 where it’s art submitted by different artists, and you can turn said art into photos, canvas prints, blankets, whatever the fuck you want really. It took a long time to receive this puppy and once it came, it was printed completely off-center! Like, comically so. So I contacted Redbubble and they shipped a new one out. Which took another three weeks. Basically I am here to tell you, redoing a bedroom may take weeks to get to the final product, so just have some patience. (Something I lack.)

Step 4: Window Treatments

With the walls and bedding done, I then concentrated on the last piece of the puzzle – window treatments. I didn’t want anything too “nursery” looking so rather than focusing on something with a koala print, I honed in on finding curtains that had purple and peach in them. I found this sparkly set off Target! Then, I got these vine curtain lights to hang in front of Winnie’s window. Lastly, I got this little area rug since it represented her entire color scheme.

If I can tell you anything about making your child’s vision come to life it’s the following: 1. Google is your BFF. 2. Be patient because some of the items you find may take quite a few weeks to finally get to you. 3. Pick a color pallet (or have your child pick it) and then work from there. Had I just gone with the koala theme, Winnie’s room would basically be shades of grey. So I’m glad I let her pick her top colors, and then I ran with it. Not to say purple and peach were easy to find together, but it all pulled together really well in the end! To check out my older daughter’s Hello Kitty/My Melody room check out this blog here. And to see how we redid our guest bathroom check out this blog here. As always, thanks for reading!