4 Bedroom house.
D1’s bedroom (2004 HS grad) I made my craft room and replaced the twin with a full size bed for D1 and H. It joins a Jack and Jill bath room to D2’s former bedroom (2010 HS grad). I made the two twin beds into bunk beds for the grand kids. This is working out great when they visit. Our guest room has a full size bed and is for D2 and H. It has its own bathroom and den if needed for work at home when visiting. This is the main guest room.
They store their personal items in the closets in their former bedrooms.
I upped the internet speed to 500 (big deal here) so we have good internet when visiting. Both still have much of their original decorations.
My husband’s childhood room was a shrine in his parents house until they finally sold it (when he was probably 50). My only daughter’s room remained hers, with lots of her stuff, but her favorite stuff is in her apartment. We are now in a smaller place and one bedroom is my office/her room to sleep over when she wants. It has a few of her things (like her books) and lots of our things also (like all the rest of our books).
Dh is already coveting s24’s room. Dh currently uses a corner of the family room as his office and would really like an office as a door. He has agreed, however, that the room will remain s24’s through at least son’s first year of college, longer if he comes home for breaks.
My next younger sister couldn’t wait for me to go to college. She started packing up my stuff and moving hers into the room almost as soon as I graduated high school. I always had a place to sleep at my parents’ home but not a space that was specifically mine past the summer after high school. The only thing that bothered me was that one of my siblings tossed or gave away some of my belongings because they were stored in that sibling’s room and the sibling wanted more space.
D’s room is now a guestroom/office since she’s permanently moved out. Though some of her stuff is still on the top shelf of the closet in there. We also have a den that we can put an inflatable mattress in if we have extra people staying over. That said, if she ever stays over, D does stay in her old room.
S still has his room, since he’s still in college and not really permanently moved out. That said, the room is more sparse then it was when he was in high school and all…
Once they were out of college and living in their new places paid for by their own jobs the rooms became mine and my husband’s. We both needed offices during the pandemic years and we both need space for our hobbies. His office has a fold out bed in it for guests. I can’t imagine why a fully launched adult would need a room at their parents’ home, but if you have the space, you do you. We have a small house which may influence my thinking on this.
My kids have been out of the house for years. When D stopped coming home from college in the summer, we turned her room into a music room for S. After he left, we redid her room into a guest room, but there’s still some select things in the room that are hers that she doesn’t want (but we can’t part with). We haven’t redone S’s room, but we plan to do it when GD can help us pick out stuff to make it “her” room (she prefers that room). It has some select things of S’s that we (not he) want to keep.
D and S both live in the area but sometimes have occasion to stay overnight with us (when D loses power, for example, or when S parties with his best buddy’s family at his parents’ house around the corner from us). When they stay, they stay in D’s old room … it has a new queen bed; the other rooms have twin beds.
When I was in college my mom kept my room more or less the same. When I moved out after college, my room turned into a guest room. My parents moved a few months after I graduated college and I stayed in the guest room/office whenever I went to visit.
Same here!
My SIL lives in a fairly large house. There is the master bedroom. One bedroom that is the computer room/office that has never had a bed in there, one bedroom that has always been the guestroom, and my nephew’s bedroom which is now also a guestroom. She kept my nephew’s bedroom the same when he was in college and also when he lived at home after college for a while. But she had my nephew take all his stuff when he moved out for good. Though she still has his old bed in there. I think my nephew and his wife stay in there when they visit. It’s funny because even though it’s now the guestroom you can tell it was a boy’s room. There is still a big old cd/tape player in the closet, one side of the bookcase is covered in surf and skateboard stickers and the bulletin board is LA Dodgers…luckily she took down the Sports Illustrated bikini poster on the ceiling. She says she is planning to downsize because she feels she doesn’t need all those extra rooms…she was widowed three years ago.
From what I’ve seen, most parents usually change their kid’s room when their kids move out for good. We have some family friends that we visited, who still have a room with hot pink walls and an orange ceiling…they never re-painted the room after their daughter moved out, though none of her stuff seems to be there. For D many of her friend’s parents have moved and/or downsized so her friends probably just stay in the guest room when they visit. I did go to one of D’s friend’s parent’s house for a Christmas party a couple of years ago. They are wealthy and live in a mansion, so they’ve always had lots of bedrooms and that includes guestrooms. From what I could tell, the three kid’s rooms are just extra guestrooms and extra rooms for storage as well…
Kids are grown and flown, but their rooms are pretty much how they left them. Cleared out stuff so it’s suitable for guests but more needs to be done. Mostly sports trophies, etc. still hanging in place. May address that over the holidays when they visit. S now has our precious GD who gets her own room when they visit (baby needs her sleep). We make it work.
Good luck! The REAL question is “who is attached to these?” The kid who earned them or mom and dad who felt they earned them with a ton of memories attached? LOL.
If you walked into my kids’s rooms you might assume they still lived here. It’s a problem.
My husband has taken over one for an office, and one is a “dryer room,” where I hang my clothes. The other is “the” guest bedroom, but you could easily still tell which room belonged to which kid.
Our son is 25. He actually still has two rooms in our house, lol. His bedroom and the spare room, which is basically his gaming room…tv and loveseat, plus lots of legos and collectibles.
He does still come home nearly every weekend to visit and often stays overnight.
We are looking to buy a house now, and I’ve told him he shouldn’t count on having two rooms in the new house…
Actually, it’s time to turn the tables. Next time we visit our son, I’m going to ask, “Hey! Where’s MY room? I brought a few things to put in there. Can you give me a hand with these boxes?”
My kid’s in university so I haven’t gotten to this stage.
But when I was a kid, I did like one of your kids and moved into my brother’s room when he went to university. I kept my stuff in my old room but used his room to study and sleep, and when he came home it was his again. My parents lived in the same house for 40 years, and throughout that time, all our bedrooms remained “ours” in the sense that our books, trophies, wall art, favourite knick-knacks (even our last calendars with things to do!) were still there and we slept in those rooms when we came home. The largest bedroom was used as a guest bedroom if an important older relative visited, or later if one of us came with a spouse. We loved having our rooms to come home to, and our stuff there so we could revisit our old lives/selves! (A downside was that when eventually the house had to be sold, there was a lot of memorabilia to get rid of…)
We moved after our kids graduated high school. They each spent one summer here but really never lived where we are.
It was important that they have their own space when they came home during college.
Now things have morphed. I have generic guest rooms and the kids have significant others. They sleep in the place that is best for their family.
If we have a family gathering, I’ve put my in laws in the primacy, it’s on the first floor, the other bedrooms are on the second. My husband and I take one of the guest rooms. 2 have queens and one room is a double. If there is a single guest, they get the double. So it’s according to bed size now.
We moved last year and our current house has one guest room (though there is also a Murphy bed in the room I use for working out). One child (D) lives 10 minutes from us although she and SIL have had occasion to stay in our guest room.
If we lived somewhere not close to either, I would still not have designated rooms for them. To me, it’s a waste of space. I would pay for hotel rooms.
We will eventually downsize to a condo and at that point, we’ll have one guest room and a pull out bed of some kind in the office. For the time being though, it feels good to have the momofboilerkid room ; ). She’s been here a ton this year which has been so nice and we have family going to school in the area so we have monthly overnight house guests. So much so that we added an extra bedroom when we remodeled the basement. I can now comfortably sleep 4 couples in actual bedrooms + we have a full size futon and a queen sized sofa bed. We’ve had a full house four times in the last year!
My in laws moved the summer before H’s last year in college. His S is 7 years older than H. His S immediately had “her” room at their new house, even though she had been married & out of her parents’ house since she was 20. H never had “his” room in that house. You can guess who is the favorite in that family.
Two of three kiddos are launched and I have one still in college. They all still have their own rooms in our home with all of their special things, books, and artwork. D2 briefly considered moving into D1’s larger, more private room when D1 moved out but it never happened. By that point, D2 was settled in her space and would leave for college soon.
Lately, I’ve been thinking it’s time to reclaim my daughters’ rooms, but D2 gets emotional whenever I broach the topic. Eventually, spouse and I will downsize and maintain a generic guest room.
Let them help you make some of the decorating/uses choices for the update and maybe they will be less emotional about it! My girls love coming home to a room that they had some input into.
