Every church building needs appropriate children’s spaces, but sometimes it’s difficult to know the best way to create a welcoming place for children on a limited budget.
This is why we recommend color. Color offers an easy way to make these spaces in your church building stand out—yet it doesn’t have to be expensive.
When it comes to upgrading children’s spaces, you can use color in many ways, even on floors and furniture, but choosing bright, colorful paint for the walls offers an attractive and inexpensive first step toward making your children’s spaces stand out.
Color Adds Drama to Children’s Spaces
As you can see in this first picture, blocks of bright color add drama to this space for younger children. Each wall is painted in a different, vibrant color. This makes it easy to see which area of your church building belongs to the children and also coordinates easily with the brightly colored chairs and partitions.
The overall impression is cheery and welcoming for children, but it didn’t require a second round of church financing in order to create the desired effect.
Paint Speaks the Language of Youth
Color also adds drama to spaces for older children, although here you can see that we chose not to use bright primary colors. Instead, the “cool” colors and varying stripes let youth know that they’re no longer stuck in the children’s wing.
The great news is that this paint job also isn’t expensive—all you have to do is tape off sections of the wall, then paint with a contrasting color to obtain this bold effect.
You can even involve the youth in the paint job, which gives them ownership of their space and reduces the labor cost line when it comes to church financing.
Color Defines the Children’s Wing of Your Church Building
This picture shows the entrance area to the children’s wing of a church building. You can see that we’ve used paint to define the space, but it’s not as overwhelming as it might be in a space dedicated to younger children.
These colors speak to every age range, with the brighter, fuller blocks of paint reserved for the younger children’s area, as you can see on the purple wall at the end of the corridor. Again, this is a relatively inexpensive way to designate the children’s wing in your church building.
Adding Thematic Additions to Your Color Blocks
If your church financing plan allows it, you can also build upon those basic blocks of color by adding themes to your children’s spaces. The wall graphics you see here are added on top of the basic paint job, creating a playful outdoor space—indoors. Dollars are easily stretched by choosing just a few large graphics, such as the tree and the child, and sprinkling in a few bird graphics to fill out the wall space.
You can also see in the same photo that we’ve chosen a wood-look vinyl flooring which fits in well with the theme (We’ll cover more on children’s space flooring in a future post!), and even added some color to the ceiling, helping to tie the entire space together without adding a lot to the church’s budget. Props are another possibility, as you can see with the colorful, patterned awnings installed above each classroom.
Learn More About Church Financing and Design
Since we’ve been constructing church buildings for over 40 years, we’ve learned a lot about how to make children’s spaces pop without breaking the budget. To learn more about getting the most out of your church building project, visit our website, where you can sign up for our i3 webinars—absolutely free.