Decorating Ideas 1971 - Boy's room: Self fulfilling prophecy.

More help from our friend The Seventies today. Today he wants to help you "boy up" an otherwise featureless white room... with minimal time, money, and give-a-damn-ness.

Step 1 - Start with a plain white room with a curious number of closets. Ideally, every vertical surface in the house should be a closet door for some reason. If your house is not like this, then stop and go do something else. Your instincts may tell you to start by painting the room some kind of interesting color. Your instincts are wrong. Leaving the room white will make it easier to redecorate once the boy is sent off to juvenile detention.

Step 2 - Boys like stripes, right? Cars have stripes. At least, the fast ones do. So, some vertical stripes will help those closet doors look more racy. Be sure to measure the width and spacing of the stripes carefully before painting. Since you're living in 1971, the stripes will be perfectly irregular by the time you get done with them.

Step 3 - Paint your stripes. Make some red for racyness and some black, to remind your boy what life will be like behind bars, when he's inevitably arrested for possession of whatever he finds in your dresser.

Step 4 - Time for a car-llage! As any interior designer can tell you, boys liks cars. Not any particular kind of car. Just anything with wheels. So, instead of choosing two-page foldouts of carefully chosen exotics displayed in reverent admiration, just cut out a bunch of car pictures and throw them on the wall all crazy-like. See, decorating a wall in the style of a multi-car pileup will scare him straight. Filling his young mind with images of chaos and destruction assure he will grow up a safe driver with no tendencies towards vehicular manslaughter or reckless endangerment at all. Also, this imagery will help him imagine his first and only full time job as a scrap yard attendant. Who cares about cars anyway? We've got interiors to design!

Step 5 - Woops! We're done! See how easy that was? Throw some books on the desk, and don't forget the scissors. He'll need those to hollow out the books for hiding his stash. Make it easy for him to choose an obvious hiding place. That way, you'll always know where to steal back the drugs he stole from you. It's the circle of life.